August 29, 2007

Dear AT&T...You Suck.

UPDATE: As of 3:00 pm today, my home phone appears to be cancelled. Spoke to a guy at AT&T yesterday afternoon who was as confused as I was about why this was taking so long. Not only did he get the order placed, but he also credited me the entire month of August. Now let's just pray that my DSL still works.

Yes, it's true. The "new" AT&T sucks just as bad as the old AT&T. I don't know which brain dead idiot(s) in the FCC thought merging 3 giant companies into one would be a good idea, but whomever it was obviously didn't have ATT as his service provider.

In order to save some ducets, I decided to cancel my home phone but keep DSL. What I didn't realize was that this request would take an act of Congress, two notary publics, 3 supervisors, 8 phone calls, and the blood of a white chicken to just get the order into the system. I did this two weeks ago...14 days...336 hours...20,160 seconds...and I'm still waiting for the order to be processed. I can guaran-freaking-tee you that if I wanted to increase my AT&Terrible monthly charges, it would have taken them 10 minutes to process the order.

In order to get the "naked DSL", I had to combine my ATT wireless bill into my wired bill. If I didn't, ATT would have charged me $15.00 a month in "network access charges" since I no longer had a home phone. Fine...well, I mean it's not fine really because if you don't use ATT wireless, you don't save shit for cancelling your local service since it costs about $20.00/month. Fortunately I'm a Cingular customer so I get a $5.00 discount for that and $5.00 for combining my bill. Wahoo.

Now the interesting part is that my cell phone bill is due next week. When I log into AT&Terrible's wireless site, it won't show me my bill. It tells me that since I'm now a combined customer, I have to sign into the wired side of the house to get my bill. OK, that makes sense. So I sign onto the wired side of the house.

And there's no bill. It shows that I paid my wired bill on August 24th and that I have no new charges. *Sigh* They best pray that my cell phone doesn't get cancelled.

Oh...wait...almost forgot. I made some changes to my cell phone in July...paid my August bill, which was higher than normal because, of course, I was prorated for the remainder of July on my new plan and I had to pay the full charges for the next month. When I called to cancel the local service, I asked if ATT could give me my new monthly cell charges...they said no, because the bills weren't issued yet and I needed to check after the 17th of August. So I did...only to be told I have to sign onto the wired side for my bill.

Comments

I had no idea that they even allowed naked DSL. It's still cheaper even with the access charge than cable internet.

When AT&T bought Cingular, I made the switch to Verizon. Two months so far, and no dropped calls. About half of my calls at Cingular were being dropped.

Posted at August 29, 2007 03:06 PM

I covet the iPhone but refuse to buy one while it's tied to the AT&T service plan. Everyone I know has problems with AT&T and Verizon -- but especially with your AT&Terrible.

I hope your cellphone service doesn't get cut off either. This just sounds like one big hassle.

Look at the bright side, things can only get better from here. Right?

Posted at September 7, 2007 09:20 AM