Friday, February 27, 2015

AT&T just accused me of being a racist

Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get any more frustrating, an AT&T supervisor essentially accused me of being a racist.  I've been going around in circles with them all day about having a technician enter our house.  I'm a little leery about letting strangers into the house after learning that the government has used repair people to do end runs around the fourth amendment.  I'm not quite ready to put in my tin foil hat, but I would like to know how it can possibly be the case that rummaging around inside our house will fix the problem.  After all, it was working for two weeks with our existing wiring, why would it not work now?

So we were at an impasse: I refused to let anyone into the house until they could answer that question, and they didn't have an answer (probably because there is no answer, because the problem is almost certainly not inside our house).  At that point the person I was talking to -- a supervisor no less -- volunteered that if I had a problem with the particular technician who showed up today that they could send "an American technician instead."

That just rendered me speechless.  Yes, I get that there are racists out there for whom this would be an issue.  But I would think that AT&T would tell their people to wait for the customer to take the initiative to make the request rather than volunteering, essentially, "If you don't like our dark-skinned people, we can send you a white guy."

I really am going to have to set up a way to record these calls so I can post them on the internet.  It looks like this drama is going to be dragging on for a while.  The next episode is scheduled for tomorrow at 11, when another technician is going to come to do God only knows what inside our house.

(BTW, and just for the record, I actually did offer to let today's technician come inside the house, but he declined.)

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