Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.Lost in the twilight zone of call-waiting by J. G. Fabiano I hung the new AT&T telephone on my kitchen wall in anticipation I would finally have both call waiting and caller ID on the primary phone in my house. The kitchen is where I spend most of my life and this would also explain the extra weight I’ve decided my body can handle. The phone was easy to hang and, apart from spending 15 minutes of my life trying to figure out where to put the batteries, I was ready to join the legions of people in the world who could filter the calls they want to take and ignore the calls they do not want to take. After the phone was hung, I called my sister-in-law and asked her to call my number in order to make sure the thing worked. I laughed at myself when I did this because, since the phone was new and was made by the company that literally invented the thing, why should I waste anyone’s time making sure it worked? It did not!After having her call me a few more times I thought I must have done something wrong because, even though the call waiting worked, the caller ID remained blank. Call waiting is nice but the primary reason I bought the phone was to ignore calls I did not want to take. I took the phone off the wall, finally consulted the instruction manual, and began my magical mystery tour of the land of telephones and corporate America. I followed the instructions carefully, thinking I must have done something wrong that the caller ID would not work. I didn’t find anything blatantly wrong with my original set up but I still did everything the book told me to do. Again, I had to laugh at myself because I can figure out bioinformatics but I can’t figure out how to set up a new telephone. After a half-hour I once again called my sister-in-law and asked her to call me so I could see if the telephone did what it was supposed to do. It did not. I was stumped. I wondered if there was something wrong with either the phone or the line leading into the phone. I then disconnected the phone in our bedroom that had call waiting and caller ID on it. Both of these systems worked. I connected that phone to the kitchen wall and once again asked my increasingly irritated sister-in-law to give me a call. The phone rang and after the second ring it showed who was calling me. This eliminated the possibility there was a problem with the connection. I then re-connected the new phone to the kitchen wall and proceeded to go through all the menu items that were installed in the phone, hoping something was initialized wrong. The first menu item had to do with the contrast of the screen that would hopefully one day show who was calling. I then went onto the next menu item that asked if I wanted the display to be in English. I couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want that choice but I didn’t play with it even though I wondered what it would be like to receive a call in another language or at least have the caller’s name displayed in another language but, a name is a name and why would it show up differently in another language?The next menu item concerned how I could save the calls coming in. It asked if I wanted them saved in the order they were received or if I wanted them saved alphabetically. I laughed at this because, if I didn’t know who was calling, how could they be alphabetized? I went on to the next menu item. This one wanted me to put in my area code. The next one wanted me to put in the closest different area code from where I lived. This seemed odd but I did what the menu asked me to do. After about another half hour playing around with the menu items I once again called my now totally ticked-off sister-in-law to give me a call. The phone rang, nothing showed up and I picked up the receiver and expressed my frustration by stating the ^@*&%#*% phone still didn’t work. Since I did not know who was calling since the caller ID still did not work I then spent the next 15 minutes of my life being admonished by my mother not to use that kind of language and where had I learned it because I had not been brought up to use it. I apologized a few hundred times and felt like a slug in the ground as I heard my mother’s anguish that her son had evolved into a toilet mouth.After I hung up I came to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with the phone and not the person trying to set it up. So, I used the same broken machine to call the store I had purchased it from and asked if I could return it. They told me I couldn’t because the warranty was with AT&T and not them. They also told me to try the help number in the manual and maybe one of their technicians could figure out the problem. I thanked the customer service person for her advice and looked up the tech’s number. With the phone number was a web page address I could also use in order to contact the company. The manual said this was the easiest way to get help and, since I was comfortable with using the web, I decided to figure out my problem on-line. This was a big mistake. Not only was I unable to get any information from their web page but I triggered an avalanche of junk email trying to get me to buy more stuff from them that didn’t work. I then tried the 800 number in the manual. Anyone who has ever tried to contact a company via phone knows that before you are able to talk to a real person you have to play the button game. What this means is that you are asked by a mechanical person to choose which option best suits your needs. This leads you to another mechanical person who asks you to choose more options and then you get disconnected and have to start the process all over again. It takes two or three times to get through the electronic maze and the possibility of talking to a real person only to be thwarted by another mechanical person who tells you that have called at a time of high call volume and it will be 29 minutes before your call can go through. Why should I be surprised if all the other stuff they sell works as well as the phone I bought from them? The mechanical person tells you not to hang up because calls will be taken in the order they were received. This means that AT&T owns the next 29 minutes of your life which you could probably have used to do something more interesting than hanging on the phone. Being the knot head that I am I decided to wait it out and actually got through to someone who was supposed to be a technical person. I tried to clear my mind of the mechanized wasteland I had been trapped in, listening to unbelievably monotonous music and the same mechanical voice telling me over and over that my call was important and I should not hang up. One of my biggest fears is that one day I will meet the person who provides the voice for the mechanical person on the other end of the phone and I will strangle her. I explained to the technical person my problem and told him all I did to fix the caller ID. When I had finished my explanation I hoped he would tell me what simple step I had missed but he did not. He told me to return the phone to the company and they would send me another. As I was a bit shocked by his comment I asked why he had no suggestions as to what I should do to fix the phone. He told me he didn’t have a clue how the phone worked and his primary task was to tell the customer where to send the phone. He also told me I would have to pay the shipping charge and the charge to receive a new phone. I came to the conclusion it would be cheaper to throw out the useless AT&T phone and buy another. The next day I did just that. I tore open the new package, put new batteries into the base of the phone and hung it on the wall. I then called my sister-in-law, who asked if I was under any kind of medication yet, to call me back to make sure the new phone worked. She called back and the phone did not work. I then spent the next hour sitting in a kitchen chair staring at the wall that held the phone that did not work. I then put the new, new phone in the garbage next to my new phone, went up stairs to the bedroom, got my old phone and hung it on the wall. Now, every time the phone rings, I have to run up to the bedroom to see who it is. At least I found a way of getting out of my kitchen and lose some weight! The End.
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