Wade writes:

I recently upgraded my 1st gen. eMac to OS 10.4. My ISP was SBC Global at the time. They informed me that they had no DSL driver for their modem under that OS and that they could not provide me with internet service under the current Mac OS. I asked when a driver would be forthcoming and the reply from customer service agent
Jennifer
was, wait for it,
I don
t know, probably never.

So, of course I changed ISP
s, to one that could actually PIS. SBC then slammed me with breach of contract for early termination even though they were the ones that could no longer fulfill their end of the; provide internet service to me. They wanted to charge me $200 for such an offense. I told them this was ludicrous, seeing as how they were not keeping up with current technology. It
s kind of sad for a company that should put being technologically current above all else, if you ask me.

Anyway, I talked to their customer service department 3 times by phone and made no headway with anyone. I might note that I
ve had been an on-time paying customer of theirs for a year-and-a-half at this point. Then I e-mailed their customer service center 3 times (this was 1 month ago. It was over a one week period, I waited 48 hours between e-mails), again, no reply to anything. So I finally wrote a snail-mail letter to their PR Dept. explaining the situation and that I had basically been ignored by customer service. I never got to send it, because 2 weeks after all of this, I received another copy of my final bill without the $200 charge on it.

I give kudos to them for waving the charge, but refusing to reply to my email and stonewalling me on the phone? Are you kidding? My total phone time spent on this was 1.7 hours on hold .2 hours talk-time. I also think it
s insane that you have to go through that much trouble to get rid of such a bogus charge. It
s like a battle of attrition and they
ve got more time to just wait you out, silently, apparently. I thought you guys might be interested in this customer service fumble. I for one will not use their services in the future if possible.

Update: We probably should have made this clear in the first place, but to the best of our knowledge, there are no drivers that should be necessary to use SBC’s DSL service with Mac OS X. Hence, absurdity.

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