Our Frustrating Weekend AT&T Nightmare

On Friday March 9 at around midday, our AT&T Uverse service stopped working. As a freelance graphic designer who works at home, the internet connection is an important part of my work day, my “lifeline” to the outside world.

I immediately stepped outside and sure enough, a service man was working on the pole where our service is connected to the terminal box. I told this person that my service went dead and asked him if he possibly disconnected me. He denied any wrong-doing, saying he has nothing to do with Uverse, only the general phone lines.

Please note that this man was full of shit.

I returned to my desk, contacted AT&T customer service and was issued a service call for 5 to 9 pm Friday evening. By 9:00, no one had shown up, or even called us. I called customer service once again and was told that there was a confirmed service outage in my area and that techs were working to solve the problem. Apparently, because of the confirmed outage, the local service people won't honor service requests, the logic being that it isn't a problem they can resolve on site.

Please note that this information was given to me by a customer service representative presumably in India.

Move forward to Sunday. My neighbor, whose service was also dead, managed to get a service man to show up at her house. Being a good neighbor and a friend, she allowed me to ask the service man if he could also help me with my problem, which he did, including a lot of help from a kind customer service rep in Dallas on the phone, as well as his local manager.

Please note that I said Dallas, not India.

Here's where the whole thing becomes unbelievably maddening. The onsite service man discovered that ALL the Uverse lines (it looked like 6-7 lines from where I was standing below the terminal box) on our block were disconnected by the first service man on Friday while he was working on replacing the old terminal box with a new one. Remember that he denied any wrong-doing.

If my original service request on Friday had been honored, my service would have been repaired within a few hours of the start of the problem, and I wouldn't be writing this blog. Instead, I waited two days for SOMETHING to happened, and was only able to get the problem resolved because my neighbor demanded that AT&T send someone out.

Here's a few pieces of advice for AT&T customer service to think really hard about:

– Get rid of the totally uniformed and hard to communicate with customer service reps oversees and put a few more Americans to work who actually care about other Americans (I know this will never happen, but it just needed to be said).

– Honor all requests for service calls, even if the tech stays for 5 minutes and says there's nothing he can do. Making people wait through a four-hour window for nothing is totally unacceptable, period.

– Hire more service men and women like Robert, who repaired our problem, a man whose "care about the customer" attitude motivated him to go above and beyond the call of duty to help me restore our service when he easily could have told me to call it in and wait for the next guy to come out.

I pay AT&T a considerable amount of money each month for TV, internet, two land lines and five wireless phones. It would be nice to get a little bit more respect and better answers from their customer service department when a problem occurs.

The alternative to AT&T is Comcast, which we know from experience isn't any better. I guess we’ll stay with AT&T for the duration, bad customer service and all.

The Fine Art of Procrastination

Each morning as I begin my work day I’m greeted by my oil painting easel, which is located behind my desk. On the easel is a white canvas with a pencil drawing – the start of a new painting. I've been greeted by this canvas for over nine months now, a daily reminder of my almost super-human ability to procrastinate.

My personal approach to life seems to be “Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?” Every single day, we establish our priorities and there’s only so much you can do, right? Our jobs are the number one priority for most of us, and when the work day ends there never seems to be enough fuel left in the physical tank to do much more than flop in front of the TV with a cold drink. How many times have you looked at a basket of dirty clothes, or the oil change sticker in your car window, or those little unrepaired annoyances around the house and said to yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow?”

Speaking of unrepaired annoyances, there have been (and still are) several not-quite-finished projects around the house. My crowning achievement of off-putting involved part of our kitchen remodel several years ago. We removed an old kitchen window that at one time opened to the outdoors. A previous owner had made an addition to the house, boxing the window in to a back-door entry room. Inside the kitchen, the old window’s space was covered by a new cabinet. Outside the kitchen, in the back-door entry room, was a hole in the wall where the window used to be, stuffed with pink insulation. For over seven years, when you walked into our house through the back door, you were greeted by this beautiful pink hole in the wall.

Last summer I finally covered it with some birch paneling, successfully achieving a personal best for “longest time procrastinating on a house project.” I was filled with pride.

I've come to the conclusion that procrastination is a hereditary trait. Supporting this conclusion is my dad, who has taken the art of procrastination to astounding heights. Last fall, after several months of pain in his shoulder (he put-off seeing the doctor, of course), he was diagnosed with a torn ligament that required surgery. Instead of getting the surgery, he left for a winter stay in Arizona and waited until he returned to Ohio in April to take care of the problem. Putting off a cure for physical pain, my dad goes down as one of the greatest procrastinators, a true inspiration for us all.

Today one of my clients called to discuss my progress on a current project. “I haven’t started working on it yet,” I said, “but I plan on getting to it this afternoon.”

Right after I finish writing this blog. And eating lunch.

Doin’ the Bump in Chicago

A quick trip to the supermarket this morning became an adventure through Chicago’s annual season of “road rehabilitation.” The old joke says there are two seasons in our fair city – winter and construction, and lately, I’ve found myself longing for those jackhammerless days of winter.

Nearly a month and a half ago, the city milled the top surface of asphalt from our block and each block to the east and west, and they still haven't returned to resurface the street. Traveling these blocks can be hazardous to the well-being of your car as you cautiously tiptoe along in a effort to go over, or around, a series of raised manhole covers that used to be flush with the street surface. Included in this maze are several potholes that formed in the deep freeze of winter that were actually repaired. But when the street surface was removed, out popped the fillings, and we’re once again left with the holes.

Arriving at the supermarket, the sidewalk at the entrance is getting a facelift, so the main drive to the store is closed. A secondary entrance is available but offers yet another milled block of city street, complete with raised manhole covers and prehistoric potholes.

After finishing the shopping, I decided to try an alternate route home because the entire return trip goes past construction, and, no surprise, the alternate route is under construction too. I turned on a side street to avoid this mess and successfully cleared the construction, only to stumble upon one of Chicago’s most brilliantly conceived traffic control devices – the speed bump.

The original notion of installing speed bumps on select streets was probably a good idea, as they do slow traffic through residential neighborhoods filled with kids and dogs and little old ladies. But it’s got to the point where the speed bumps are everywhere, like some sort of twisted infestation, and using the side streets as alternatives to the busy main thoroughfares has become an up and down experience.

As the construction projects craw to finish dates unknown and more speed bumps are installed I'm left with one thought: how much for a Humvee?

A Coach is Just a Coach, Unless He’s Your Dad

Back in 2007, I made the determination that my life didn’t include nearly enough stress between April and August, so I volunteered to manage my son’s baseball team. This was a decision I based on nothing resembling logic, as I have absolutely no baseball background whatsoever. Everything I knew about baseball, at the time, I learned from watching the Chicago Cubs, and you know how they’ve fared over the past 102 years. But with the the love of my son placed under my cap, I began serving time as a baseball coach.

2007 to 2009 involved three incredibly bad teams – one team of 9 and 10 year olds and two teams of 11 and 12 year olds. By the end of last season, my record stood at a laughable 4 wins, 41 losses. My best finish, as it played out, was last summer. I took the boys to the playoffs in last place out of six teams, won a playoff game, and ended the season in fourth place. It was a small victory for a guy with a very small amount of knowledge of what it takes to coach a little league team.

This summer I decided that I had to redirect my priority to my two daughters. That decision, combined with the proclamation from their mother that I would be put to death if I coached baseball again, was intended to be a move towards something I thought I had a better handle on: fast-pitch girls softball.

Here’s an important tidbit of information for all you coaching dads and dads who want to be coaches out there – softball is still baseball, only it’s played by girls, who throw a big green ball underhanded. Who knew?

Managing the 14 to 17 year-old girls this summer to a 1 win, 11 loss season has guided me down an entirely new avenue to defeat, one that embraces pony tails, press on nails and priorities other than softball, such as boys. Which is who this “journey of enlightenment” started with. Only now, instead of trying to motivate them to play hard and win baseball games, I’m trying to motivate them to leave the girls alone so they’ll play hard and win softball games.

When it’s all said and done, my daughters seem to be happy that I’m going through it by their sides, which is what it’s all about in the first place. Somebody’s got to do it, right?

The Good, The Bad & The Boredom

As a freelancer I often have downtime. But unlike those of you who have real jobs, when I have downtime I'm at home, and finding the motivation to fill my time during working hours with anything but design work can be problematic.

My guilty conscience says: “Do a little networking.”

My response is: I deserve some time off.

My guilty conscience says: “Do some laundry.”

My response is: I hate folding clothes.

My guilty conscience says: “Spend some time with the kids.”

My response is: I want to take a nap.

For a freelancer, not working means not making money, which adds a small amount of stress to the situation. The job involves a feast or famine scenario; I'm either really busy, pushing deadlines and stressed beyond belief, or I'm doing little to nothing, yawning my way through the day.

Self-employment does have it's benefits. I can come and go as I please, answering to no one. I have no restrictions on clothing, but I've never been one of those, “I can go to work naked if I want” kind of guys. My foremost responsibility is to the work itself. If I knock-out a logo or a brochure or an ad that makes the client happy, and if I give it to them at a reasonable price, they’ll remain a client well into the future.

After 12 years of doing this there's one thing I've learned for sure–try to relax during times of famine. History proves that the feast is just around the corner, coming any day. And when that happens, I always wish I would have appreciated the famine a little bit more.

Now if you'll excuse me, the big comfy coach awaits.

The Joy of Parenthood...Huh?

Jenny and I recently met a very nice couple trying desperately to start a family. For them, traditional and scientific methods of getting pregnant were a bust, so, no surprise, they decided to adopt. These extraordinary efforts were costing them thousands of dollars, just to get one stinkin’ kid.

“Someone needs to sit these people down,” I said, “and tell them they can actually be happy in life without any kids.” We have friends with no offspring, and they seem perfectly happy, living life without the many frustrations that accompany the parent trap.

So, by now you're thinking that I wish I had never had my three kids, but nothing is further from the truth.

Frustrations aside, they're pretty amazing people. Number 1 is a sweet 14 year-old girl who’ll be going to one of the best high schools in the entire state of Illinois this fall. Number 2 is a mostly happy boy who loves sports and aced his final seventh grade report card. Number 3 is an honor roll student who always wants to tag along wherever we go.

Amazing as they may be, they’re still kids, and part of being a kid is learning on the fly, doing things that we as intelligent, logical and mature humans consider outrightly stupid. The one word that comes to mind is “broken.” Broken is a word that aptly describes much of the childhood experience, referring to teeth and bones, toys, furniture, windows, shoelaces, electronic devices, skin, friendships, backpacks, eyeglasses, and ____________(fill in the blank).

It’s been said by many scholarly moms and pops that what our kids do to us is just payback for what we did to our parents. That may be the truth. Thinking back to my youth, and some of the havoc I wreeked growing up, it’s a small miracle that my parents still talk to me today.

To that nice couple working on number one I say this – when the frustrations start and things start to break, give me a call and we’ll meet for a few drinks.

Oh my god. He's doing a blog...

I've often been compared to my mother, a woman with a lot to say, regardless of whether or not you really want to hear it. Do I, like my mother have a lot to say? Yeah, sure. Do you really want to hear what I have to save? Probably not. That's the beauty of a blog; you can read it, or you can turn the page.

Writing is a skill I've tried to develop over the years as an advertising guy. As a freelancer, it was always easier and faster for me to write the ads I designed, instead of hiring a real copywriter. I learned much from two writers from my past – Mike Jablonski, rest his soul, my long-time partner at DMB&B, and Bob Killian, a previous employer who I never formally thanked for all he taught me (if you're reading this Bob, consider it the formal "thanks").

My life is reasonably interesting. I have a home-based design business, which gives me plenty of time to worry about money and yell at my kids. I coach their baseball and softball teams, an annual source of good material to scream about. Stay tuned for the sports stories.

Jenny and I go to a favorite Mexican restaurant on Friday nights where we've met some very interesting people. More fodder for blogging. We're surrounded by some of the most notably insane friends and family anyone could hope to burden themselves with, offering a bit more for the old blog spot.

I'll try to make it, at the very least, mildly humorous, so anyone reading can get a laugh and feel a sense of relief that they aren't me.

Don't go away. This might get interesting...