I'm old enough to remember a time when there was only one phone company—we called it the phone company. And while the company didn't have any competition, affordable rates or spark of innovation, it did possess a little thing called customer service. You could call Ma Bell for any reason, and in no time at all, a nice man drove up and fixed "your" phone in a jiffy, without charge. Those were the halcyon days of telecommunications. And the other day, I saw a glimmer of it again. Albeit, briefly.

Long-time readers of this website are all too well aware of my many issues with the current incarnation of AT&T (here, here, here and here). And while the company's management is clearly a bunch of money-grubbing evil bastards, the people who work for them couldn't be more different.

A recent—and admittedly infrequent—POTS outage forced me to seek out AT&T's Customer Service phone number, so naturally, I started with their website, att.com.

Attempting to sign-in, I was met with the stony silence of the "Username/Password incorrect" warning. Yet even after resetting the password, I continued to get the same warning and couldn't get past the login. Failing to find a phone number anywhere else on the site, I googled it, and the page came right up. Of course.

So I phoned AT&T and got immediately passed into the dreaded automated phone tree hell. During the next 15 minutes, I answered, and then confirmed, innumerable questions "to direct my call to the proper agent," including "What number are you calling about?" I mention this only because I was asked this question TWICE during my call! They also asked me if I had another number where I could be reached even though I have had a cellphone through them for two years. Clearly, AT&T still hasn't merged databases from acquiring SBC, Cingular, et al, because they're so busy raising my rates for no reason).

I finally got to the part where I could ask a technician to come over and look at my line—$55 first 20 minutes, then $20 more for each 20 minutes after that—but I was told, in a painfully slow and automated manner, that I could "get an appointment on Monday between 8am and 8pm...There are no available service appointments on Monday" causing me to go back and choose the next day, and the next day, none of which apparently had any openings.

Frustrated, I pressed "0" to get a human and was told that "was not a correct response." However, a second "0" miraculously got me connected to flesh and bone.

The service rep then told me I could get a technician over there the next day. (What? But the computer says no!) So we set up the appointment for Monday morning—shocking. More amazingly, a mere two hours later, a pleasant tech guy drives up offering to fix it right then and there...on a Sunday afternoon, no less.

It was just like the old days—the days when AT&T had their shit together. When AT&T had employees who tried to help instead of trying to screw you with hidden monthly charges and fine print. When AT&T was only a full-on corporate monopoly instead of wannabe technological overlords bent on the total subjection of all digital content and, by extension, all humankind.