Too good to be true
Sooner than I hoped, I had to try my new iPhone app FastCustomer. It's advertised as a way to "Talk to a real person at (in my case, ATT Internet Services)."
It seemed so easy. I chose the company name from an alphabetical menu, then clicked on the big green button that said "Have someone call me." Less than five minutes later my phone rang. So far so good.
Sadly, though, it wasn't a real person on the other end. It was call-center background noise, nothing more. So I hung up, as the app suggests, and tried again. This time I got something else: the familiar "All customer service representatives are busy, please stay on the line."
Whether the ten minutes or so it took for a real person to finally answer was less than if I had called on my own I don't know. I've certainly waited longer, although since I was calling at 11:30 pm they shouldn't have been super-busy. On the other hand, the ATT telephone voicemail system never offered me the option of talking to a person, so at least FastCustomer got me past that roadblock.
Incidentally, the person I eventually talked with seemed genuinely sorry that he couldn't tell me how to change the settings on my Apple Airport Express after deciding that the problem was simply an incorrect password. I managed to change them on my own after reading the manual and poking around a few on-screen menus.
After a few moments of success, enough to download a bunch of emails, the green light on my Airport changed to amber, and I'm dead in the water again. Tomorrow's task: take the dang thing to the Apple store and try to get a replacement.
