Linksys Support, Swing and a Miss, Strike One

Alas, the honeymoon is over. My new Linksys CIT400 Skype phone is having problems. Little things, like needing to be rebooted to make a phone call. The manual suggests "checking the cables" - I checked them, they're fine, now what..

Call support, of course. I did (after three unsuccessful attempts to use their online chat facility - Stacey 12088 just didn't want to chat, I guess).

Their support team was something else. A guy answered the phone immediately, after some diagnosis, he said "I think it's defective, let me transfer you to someone who can help you return it." Then he went away for 5 mins. He came back with a new guy; the new guy said "I'm Joe's team lead, I'll transfer your call to customer service" and then he went away for another 5 or so minutes.

Jason came on next; he was going to help me. He took down the trouble ticket number, then went off to retrieve the ticket (again, "please hold for 5 minutes"). He came back, he couldn't find the ticket. He read the number back to me, it was wrong.. Grrr.. So I corrected him, off he went again (this time asking for 8 to 10 minutes, but I talked him down to 5 minutes, we made a game of it, I said "it's 6:11pm PT, you have til 6:16, go" - he didn't like our game).

Jason came back, still couldn't find the ticket. He read back the number again. The same incorrect one he had read the first time. I called him an idiot, in a nice way though (I thought it was nice anyway, but hurt his feelings. I apologized, he went off to find the new ticket number.

He came back again. He read the information from the ticket. He then asked who my phone line provider was - I thought that odd, but went along (AT&T). He then said "oh, ok, we have an agreement with AT&T, you need to call them to get the phone fixed?

Excuse me? I don't see where AT&T comes into this at all. It's a Linksys phone. I bought it from Amazon. Sure, AT&T provides my phone line, but the phone line isn't a problem, as demonstrated by my using it for 90 minutes while talking to you Jason.

I lied. I told Jason I used Southern Bell (is there even a Southern Bell anymore?). Wouldn't you know it, Linksys has an arrangement with Southern Bell as well. I tried very hard to convince Jason that he had to be wrong, to no avail. He pointed out that he's been doing this for two years, so he must know what he's doing.

I knew there was a reason I didn't like buying things online!