Of course it's entirely possible the poor dumb wonk on the other end of Dana's phone is suffering from "Management forgot to tell us that" syndrome.

Oh, absolutely. It's not her fault that AT&T can't get its shit together. It is her fault, however, that her solution was to connect me to the same number that I'd already told her didn't work.

And of course there's always the "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill myself".

I have often felt, both working customer service and calling customer service, as though there were some sort of buffer on the lines, perhaps at the switchboard, that translates all questions and answers into Swahili, Serbo-Croatian, and British Sign Language before turning it back into English. It's bizarre. And I say this having been AT&T customer service. "Okay, but did you pay the bill?" "No, I never got a bill!" "And you've been making phone calls for three months?" "Yes, and I never got a bill!" "And... you're wondering why your phone service has been cut off?" "Right, I never got a bill!" "So... you assumed it was free?" "I never got a bill!" "Right, well let's check your address, but you are going to have to make a payment to turn it back on." "But I never. Got. A bill!"

ETA: Yo, MM, could you send me your address when you get a chance?

The IV DHE should pack a mighty punch.

Oh, and IM Imitrex, but that's usually way after the ripe abortive period. It feels like it clears up the muck, but my panicked gratitude and need to flee can make data hard to analyse.

Compazine gives me the sort of panic attacks where I honestly want to start walking home. It's just horrible. Taken with benadryl it's a lot better. The dilaudid still makes me twitchy, but it's a bit more manageable.

"No, you're high, we offer nothing like that" only to find out after the call that, oops, we *do* offer that, they just forgot to mention that. Heh. Whups.

Been there, written the follow up "mea culpa" email.

Hubby is brilliant at CS stuff, especially surveys etc. He can convince any caller that he actually is calling from their area. His voice morphs into the prevailing accent that he's hearing, and he can do BS like, "Oh, I'm at the call center they put in in the industrial park on the old highway, you know, down from the gas station?" Which actually described the place he was working out of, but which also fit the majority of areas he was calling. As he said, "There's always an old highway, and towns are always putting in industrial areas on old highways."

MM, I've got a recent experience for you--but I need to type it all up in a relatively coherent manner.

I've finished the book and handed it off to DH. He smiled at me and said, "That was fast."

Um, yeah. It's that good.

Oh, and MM, you'll also be getting a few "The Hatred of the Lazy CS Person for the Desperate Person on the Phone" stories, illustrating how people who are only in it for beer money for Friday night indulge in penny ante sadism on the callers.

I'm compulsively vanity googling.

I already sent MM my favorite CS story, but I have another series that's pretty good, too. Are you aware of how many men use 1-800 numbers for free phone sex? I used to work for the reservation line for a hotel chain and we had regulars call trying to engage us in phone sex. After the shock wore off, it was fairly amusing. Especially on slow nights when we'd put the guys on speaker phone.

ChiKat, that was common the whole time I worked retail, because retail is mostly young woman who have to answer the phone by saying their name and being polite.

I wrote an essay about it called The Pantyhose Man.

One perv called scared me so bad I called the cops. I was working alone in a Payless shoestore and I was 18. The man said he was going to come and see me when i got off work.

Freaked me right out.