Mental midgets and morons at AT&T

wabower

wabower

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Wayne
You may recall a recent post inquiring about U-Verse. Here's "the rest of the story" as related to my neighborhood email group.

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After much deliberation, hesitation and trepidation based on their demonstrated incompetence when they owned the local cable system, I finally succumbed to the alleged financial benefits of "bundling" the phone and cable services into U-Verse and scheduled the installation for last Friday the 14th.

After subsequently learning of a friend's funeral that required an unplanned day in Tyler, on Thursday we called to defer the appointment until a better time within the 30-day time window they provide.

At approximately 9:00pm on Friday evening, I noticed that the internet service had stopped working (red blinking lights on the modem.) After all reset-reboot efforts failed, I called DSL tech support, politely explained my problem and asked for help. After looking at my account, the tech guy's first question was "have you tried to do anything with U-Verse recently?"

When I told him about the set-up appointment and subsequent deferral, he said the company had disconnected my phone line and DSL service in order to "port it over" to U-Verse. I told him "no problem, just hook it back up" since the install wouldn't happen for at least a few days and I didn't want to be without service in the interim. He said he would turn it over to their crack team of technicians who would keep me informed of the progress.
Yeah, right.

After an hour I called back to check on progress and (after being put on hold for almost 50 minutes) talked to another guy. He said they couldn't turn it back on, that the account had been terminated, they had no records of the prior account (of more than 20 years duration) and that I would have to call "Installations" the next morning during business hours. During the conversation, he wanted to know if there were any dogs or locked gates on the property, which was my first strong clue that I was dealing with idiots, since it was clear that they couldn't understand that they had wrongfully disconnected the service without my authorization, permission or knowledge, and this guy was just looking for excuses.

When I called the installations department on Saturday morning, the guy was somewhat apologetic about the mistake, said they would rectify it, but their first available installation date was on October 25. IOW, they think it's OK to mistakenly cut off my phone and internet service and then make me wait for almost two weeks to restore it. After a couple of YGBSM's and other verbally-colorful interactions during which I may have reverted to language from my small-town Oklahoma up-bringing, he turned me over to the "elevation" department where another moron basically said "it wasn't our fault, the system did what it was supposed to do" and then implied the problem was partially my fault. Huh?

Bottom line is that I'm without service for the weekend, but they promised to reinstall the service on Monday. When they asked about setting up another install date, I told them the 12th of Never would be a pretty good estimate and that I had lost confidence in their ability to manage a two-car funeral, let alone run a telecommunications company and that I would be a "former customer" as soon as I figure out the alternatives.

I guess my only question at this point involves political correctness. Is telling the phone company they can "put their U-verse where the sun don't shine" considered as such?
 
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Sounds like good ol' customer feedback to me....
 
Welcome to deregulated service. Your copper pair has been "de-engineered" and you won't be getting it back.

Common tactic of both AT&T and Verizon will next be that your original copper pairs will be deemed "non-qualified" to *ever* go back to that service.

U-Verse isn't typically regulated by a Public Utilities Commission or Tariffs so they'll eventually triple your pricing on the service.

Same thing on Verizon FIOS.

I hope you have CableTV-based IP data service available to play off of for future pricing. That copper pair is gone from the database and won't be re-entered into it.

That's been the business plan behind these services all along. Remove Regulation...
 
Isn't it rich that we know conventional wisdom dictates not to fly the A model of anything yet so many seem ready and willing to hop onboard the latest tech system?

BTW: Vonnage did the same exact thing. Time to stop dropping names such as FCC and your state's regulatory agency.
 
denverpilot said:
Welcome to deregulated service. Your copper pair has been "de-engineered" and you won't be getting it back.

Common tactic of both AT&T and Verizon will next be that your original copper pairs will be deemed "non-qualified" to *ever* go back to that service.

U-Verse isn't typically regulated by a Public Utilities Commission or Tariffs so they'll eventually triple your pricing on the service.

Same thing on Verizon FIOS.

I hope you have CableTV-based IP data service available to play off of for future pricing. That copper pair is gone from the database and won't be re-entered into it.

That's been the business plan behind these services all along. Remove Regulation...
Click to expand...

But wait! I keep hearing Congress members and presidential candidates decrying the over-regulation of businesses. Surely that must be true else they wouldn't be telling us how important it is to reduce regulations to increase jobs. And they want to do away with a number of bureaucracies such as the FDA because everyone knows that our food and drug supply is perfectly safe and needs no regulation. Right? :confused:

Surely this little problem with AT&T must just be a bit of confusion on the part of the consumer. Right? :rolleyes:
 
Copy of email sent to AT&T CEO today.

_______________________________
Subject: Customer Service

Randall,

From a customer’s viewpoint, the endemic incompetence and ineptitude of this department is incredible to behold.

If you want to have a cup of coffee and talk about it, please let me know.

Regards,

Wayne Bower
SCCutler said:
Wayne:

Try Clearwire for Internet, and buy an Ooma box for the dial tone. Cheap, good.

Then, get DirecTV for video, and call it, "done."
Click to expand...
 
Gmaper said:
But wait! I keep hearing Congress members and presidential candidates decrying the over-regulation of businesses. Surely that must be true else they wouldn't be telling us how important it is to reduce regulations to increase jobs. And they want to do away with a number of bureaucracies such as the FDA because everyone knows that our food and drug supply is perfectly safe and needs no regulation. Right? :confused:

Surely this little problem with AT&T must just be a bit of confusion on the part of the consumer. Right? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Actually yes. FIOS and Uverse cost a lot more to deploy than the consumer believes. The current pricing is pretty much what's known as a "loss leader" in any other industry.

When these companies finally get around to recouping their costs or attempting to make a profit, the consumer will scream "unfair evil Corporations".

At least that's my personal prediction, anyway. Want 10Mb/s+ to the curb, it ain't realistic to think that big of a high-speed network can be built or maintained at today's prices for labor and materials at the "bundled" price of $19.95/month.

You'll either see higher prices or worse service, down the road a ways. Not that many years out, either.

Comcast for all their warts doesn't play this game quite as hard as the telcos. They'll offer you sweetheart deals if you're a new customer for six months then bend you over and extract at least $1500/year minimum for TV, phone, and Internet.

The politicians decry the "over"-regulation because they know these companies are how they get elected and paid. Doesn't matter which Party. I've covered that before in other threads. They don't work for you or me anymore at all.
 
I used to have Verizon Fios, or 'no phone, no tv' as we knew it at the time.

Three months and every level of customer un-support Verizon could muster couldn't get their POS service to run. In the end I pulled the fiber out of the grass all the way back to their connector box in my neighbors yard, curled the cable on top and mailed the equipment to their billing address PO box.
 
Few people, unfortunately, hate AT&T as much as I do. At one time they had all my business, then they started a program of harassing their customer base. I would get letters, phone solicitors, and salespeople into my shop on pretty much a daily basis for one or all of them. All these "deals" they would offer me, were always much better and cheaper than the deal I had already bought from them, even if I had signed on for their latest deal the day before.

After about a year of this continual interruptions of my work day, I had finally had enough. I canceled every AT&T account I had, including my home phone. I switched over to another provider, Cox Cable, who rarely, if ever, interrupt my work day at all.

What really blew me away was as soon as I was no longer a customer of AT&T, the harassment completely stopped. No letters, no phone solicitors, no door to door salespeople. AT&T only harasses their existing customers???????

I do get a letter now and then, but that is all.

I am paying less, much less than I was with AT&T.

Anyway, after every account was closed, it turned out that AT&T owed me $65.00.

I would get a bill every month that showed my credit due of $65.00, then they deducted their late fee and interest. When the statements got down to around twenty dollars, I called them about it.

I got a sharp young fellow on the phone after lengthy delays, who worked through it all and saw what was going on. I was on the phone with this guy for about half an hour. I asked him when I could expect my check for the full $65.00. He told me to go and F**K myself, and hung up. I am not making this up, it happened.

A few days later I received a check from AT&T that settled our accounts. It was for two cents. Two whole cents with a first class stamp on the envelope.

I saved the check n my front counter, I share this story with anyone who asks about the check for two cents from AT&T.

It was worth the $65.00 lesson about just what my generation has turned loose into the world. AT&T, was once a very proud and well respected company. Now it is run by people who are at about the same level as carnival barkers.

They are sleazy, disrespectful, and they are blatant thieves. That same generation is now running most of our government offices and private industries. That is the real reason our economy is what it is, the results of pure greed.

John
 
I have actually had pretty good service from AT&T, but I know it's not always thus, and you have to call and threaten to drop their service from time to time in order to maintain decent pricing.

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What I find most bizarrely ironic is, I remember when I was in college and AT&T (what we called, the "Bell System") was fighting against the federal government anti-trust suit, prosecuted with millions upon millions of tax dollars, the ultimate upshot of which was that AT&T and its component pieces, including all of the "R-BOCs" (Regional Bell Operating Companies), were broken up into a bunch of separate operating entities.

Then, one by one, they consolidated, with Southwestern Bell (which cleverly renamed itself, "SBC") acquiring the RBOCs and, after AT&T had spun down to near-extinction, SBC bought AT&T, and renamed the entire amalgamation, AT&T.

Everything old, is new again.
 
Yup. Broke 'em up horizontally, they re-formed vertically. A friend in the biz predicted that clear back in '81 when Judge Greene broke 'em up the first time.

Telecom in the Information Age is a Natural Monopoly. The breakup hastened new tech into telco but didn't change their attitude.

AT&T recently celebrated 135 years in business. A lot of bad habits and some really deep and big Kingdoms and Moats get built in that amount of time.
 
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