Yet Another Exclusion

Friday morning 2 weeks ago, Robert, the wireless tech, called to say he was on his way. Minutes later, the doorbell rang, and Amir and Kendra stepped in and just stood there in the hall. I didn’t even get up from the couch several yards away, which is unlike me. But I wanted Spectrum - not AT&T, and my neck hurt. “Are you techs?” I asked. “No,” they said. They wanted me to buy a cell phone.

I had spent my first 4 days at this new apartment calling South Africa, India and various other locations around the world because apartment management has an “exclusion”: all tenants must use management's internet choice.

“You’re both here to sell me a phone?” I asked Kendra and Amir.

“Well,” Amir said inexplicably, “I have a doctorate in network security, and I’ve used it to make $100,000.”

“I have a doctorate too,” I said. “But I’m broke and I don’t want a $2,000 phone. If you have that much money, why are you here for AT&T?”

 "I'm moving to South Carolina," he said, which clearly didn’t explain anything.

Just then, Robert arrived, nodded at the couple in the foyer and started to try to find the internet connection. He clearly didn’t know why Kendra and Amir were there, but he said I was getting a landline.

“Who would even want a landline?” I wondered. "I don't want any new phones."

Kendra and Amir shifted around and finally moved to the door. Meanwhile, Robert couldn’t get the connector to work. He went outside several times, then called his supervisor, then went down the street. This went on for hours. “Your connection isn’t working,” he finally said.

So we began to look through the apartment until he found a fiber connection in the closet, which he wasn’t supposed to use under this contract.

When I had reluctantly begun to call AT&T four days before, the first person I got was an Indian woman in South Africa who wanted to know everything about me, including my favorite Indian food, spiritual perspectives, and why I didn’t have any books in South Africa. Insofar as AT&T, she said she had no idea what she was signing me up for, but she had to send me authentication codes. After over an hour on the phone, she told me she had to call me later to continue the codes. This went on for days with various AT&T representatives.

The Friday I told Robert I just wanted high-speed wireless, he said the contract only allowed 33 mbps. But I was lucky: Robert was a good guy. He did what others would not have and called another supervisor to get special permission to use the fiber and increase the speed. I knew that if it had been any other tech, the fiber would not have been approved, and there would have been more hours of trouble trying to get the non-fiber connection working.

By the time he finished, it was mid-afternoon. I was ecstatic to have wireless again, but I still wasn’t done with the process, which involved several more calls to AT&T.

This Friday at 5pm, exactly 2 weeks after Robert installed my internet (3 weeks since I moved in), management left a note on my door, which is a trigger for me (I moved here to escape the "drill sergeant" management of my last lovely apartment, whose notes and knocks on doors I dreaded: But that's another story.) 

At any rate, the note here on my door announced a new exclusion: Management has chosen a new internet company: All tenants must immediately get rid of AT&T.