Yahoo! tells me it’s 92° F outside, and I believe it. I was just lost for about two hours in South Boston trying to find the AT&T Broadband office so I could return our cable box.
South Boston is a little different from Boston proper. I walked the wrong way (thanks to bad directions) over a bridge that led over a railroad boneyard and under I-93, and to the home of the Boston Herald before I found my mistake. The drop location was on West Broadway, but I had just looked up the same number on Broadway—the street number didn’t exist, but that didn’t stop Yahoo from cheerily giving me directions on how to get to the grittiest part of the road under the I-93 overpass. Then the AT&T wireless operator couldn’t give me a direct number for the drop location, so I had to go through menu hell and patiently explain to the “customer service representative” that I just wanted to know how to get to the drop location.
Eventually I got turned around and headed the right way on West Broadway, past the boarded up church and parish of St. Peter and St. Paul (est. 1844), a bakery (closed), a low income housing complex (boarded up and quiet), a liquor store with elaborate murals for independence for Northern Ireland and the Dropkick Murphys logo. I finally found the drop location, turned in the box and remotes, and turned around and started back. Thank God for the otherwise unremarkable sub shop along the way back, or I’m pretty sure I would have dropped dead of heatstroke before getting back to the T.
Whose bright idea was it to make cable dependent on set top boxes that had to be returned to the cable company when terminating service? Every AT&T Broadband location I’ve ever found is in the ass end of nowhere.