Speaking of weird things with phones. I moved to a new location the first of November and had to get a new phone number for my landline. At the old apartment I had ATT's U Verse which runs the phone through the internet, and wanted to consider something different since I never did like the fact that when the power goes out so does my phone. But I ran into so many problems I decided it's best to let sleeping dogs lie as it were and get whatever is the least hassle.
At the new place at first I had no phone or internet, and my only connection to the world was the public computer room half a football field from my apartment, which isn't an easy walk with my arthritis which requires using a walker. I tried and tried to roust anyone at ATT on the computer and got nowhere. Finally I got a message that said there is no ATT service at my new address, even that there is no such address. I had to give up the quest from sheer tiredness.
I emailed my brother and he called them from his phone and they wouldn't tell him anything because they had to speak to me personally.
When he came over a few days later he called from my place and I got to talk to them. After the usual frustration of being transferred from one ATT office to another I was told that there is no ATT service at my apartment, actually that there is no such apartment, they were quite sure of that, but that I could at least cancel my former service, so they transferred me to the Cancellation Department which immediately broke the connection.
I called back and my brother had to do all the numbers punching because I don't see very well any more, and they cancelled the old service. But I still didn't have new service which they'd told me isn't available at this address. In fact my address apparently exists only in the Twilight Zone.
But when we told the building manager about this she said that's ridiculous, this building is served exclusively by ATT. My brother found this out when he was leaving the building so I was once again without connection to the world including to him until he was able to return.
He couldn't come back for a while but a friend showed up and she called ATT for me on her phone. She talked to a nice guy for about an hour as he tried to sort out the mystery of the nonexistence of my apartment according to their records. He finally said he'd have to get back to her after the weekend. Yeah, too bad it was a Friday. She had to go back to her place which is a long way away. So I had another few days without connection to the world, unless I did the painful trek to the public computer room. Which of course I did though a run-through of the links at ATT was as usual futile, probably due partly to my bad eyes and the fact that the older I get the harder it is to negotiate the constantly "improving" technologies.
Perhaps needless to say the nice guy at ATT did NOT contact my friend and of course I didn't know that until I went to the computer room again and found her email.
All this confusion took about two weeks by the way. Finally my brother called again on his phone and told them off and they promised to get me the most basic of phone services installed as a sort of compromise just so I would have something. They gave him a phone number. On the scheduled day they apparently flipped a switch at ATT and my phone started working. I gave the number to my email list. Hooray.
But it turned out to be an internal ATT number and I started getting phone calls from ATT workers trying to reach headquarters, which at first I just thought were wrong numbers.
But now I was at least able to use my own phone to call ATT. I got a nice guy in Springfield Missouri who wanted to chat about how such a dry state as Nevada gets its water, and like most people who have never been to Nevada he was picturing hot and dry Las Vegas not cold and dry Northern Nevada where we get snow. Do we collect rain water? I was kind of flummoxed, never heard of collecting rain water and got confused to the point that I forgot we probably don't even get enough rain water to bother collecting it, and that our water comes from the Sierra Snow Pack melt that fills the reservoirs in the Spring.
Not that I minded the diversion, it was entertaining. And he did more or less sort things out for me. Scheduled an ATT installation appointment to get my U Verse up and running so I could also have my internet again, told me it could take as long as four hours and they'd charge me a lot for the installation. That precipitated more "entertaining" conversation but at least I had enough of my wits together to write down every code. phone number and confirmation number he gave me along with his name and employee number.
The day came for the installation and it took all of twenty minutes, though I'm sure I'll still be charged for four hours. But now I had a new phone number so I had to notify the email list of the change.
It's still not clear why my apartment showed up in the Twilight Zone but I assume it's now manifested on Planet Earth at least for the time being.
BUT.
Now I had two phone numbers, two separate phone accounts since they didn't close out the earlier one that was an internal ATT number. So I had to make another call to ATT, another stressful long call, and all but one of those numbers I had managed to write down turned out not to be the answer to any of the questions they asked me, so it took a long time getting through the whole thing but in the end as far as I know all is well. Except that the stress must have drastically shortened my life expectancy.
Edited by Faith, : many small changes for clarity
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