Customer Service From Hell

My kids are currently travelling in Australia. Before they left, we went through great pains to make sure they had cell phone service while abroad. Supposedly, this is a piece of cake when you activate the international roaming service through AT&T wireless. It's probably a bit more expensive than other alternatives, but the simplicity of it all made it very attractive. So we activated the international roaming service before the trip expecting everything to go smoothly. Boy, was I wrong!

My daughter calls me from Australia from a landline to tell me that her phone doesn't work. So I call AT&T customer service and this is the comedy of errors that ensued:

Customer Service Agent #1 - She tells me that the international roaming service should be in effect on the phone and she doesn't know why it doesn't work. But she does give me another number to call that specifically addresses international phone service.

Customer Service Agent #2 - She tells me that the international roaming service somehow did not register to the phone when it was initially ordered. The solution is to discontinue the service and then reinstate it. However, she cannot do this so she has to transfer me to another agent.

Customer Service Agent #3 - She tells me that she cannot do what Customer Agent #2 wanted her to do because my phone service is technically on a business plan and she cannot handle any service on a business plan. So she transfers me to -

Customer Service Agent #4 - This idiot tells me that my daughter's phone won't work in Australia because it doesn't have the proper bandwidth. I know this is wrong because every previous agent has checked this and said that the phone should work fine. I walk him through the AT&T website location where you can check to see if your phone will work overseas and I actually have to convince him that the phone is not the problem. Then he goes ahead and does what Customer Service moron #2 had initially recommended.

So after all this, I am dubious that my daughter's cell phone will ever get any service in Australia. My favorite piece of advice I kept getting from all of the agents was to have my daughter call this great toll-free customer service number from her cell phone so AT&T could troubleshoot the problem. I had to point out to them that she can't call the customer service number because the phone doesn't get any service!