Bitchy McComplainsalot Project 365 (2011)

Day 46/365: Dear AT&T

15feb2

Dear AT&T:

You have been a part of my life for a very long time. My entire adult telecommuncations life has been spent making out checks to you, or clicking “make payment now” links on your website. I have given you thousands and thousands of dollars and tons and tons of my attention over the years. You have both enabled me to connect with the world and then made it maddeningly difficult to do so. So it is with complete sincerity and utmost seriousness that I say the following:

May your entire company and everyone associated with it jump straight up my butt.

Go on. All of you. No, more. Keep going. I can take it.

What’s wrong? You’re suddenly afraid of hurting me? That’s odd.

Because you have been a pain in my ass for as long as I can remember.

I am woozy with AT&T fatigue. I have dealt with your constant barrage of stupid letters in the mail, your sickeningly cheerful salespeople who will kill a person’s spirit with a smile on their face, your dishonest marketing, your bait and switch attempts, your bills that creep up in cost and have to be monitored, your inability to honor my request to have a PLAIN FUCKING PHONE LINE, your constant telemarking attempts to sell me shit I have repeatedly refused. I have stuck with you over the years in part out of some sick sense of battered customer loyalty and, let’s be frank, laziness and ennui. Because what was I to do? You were the only game in town for a long time. You like it that way.

When I moved into the house and asked to have my service transferred here from my apartment, your salesman smiled widely and helped me do just that. Except not so much, because the service I had transferred wasn’t even available in my new neighborhood. Isn’t that something you guys should know and tell a gal before signing her up for something she can’t technically even get? Your company was more than happy to not tell me the details (and how could I have known otherwise?), and then to charge me for service I was never going to be able to get. I sucked it up and held out for a variety of reasons I will not get into here. For more than a year, I endured dismally slow internet speeds. I’m talking speeds that made it impossible to do more than one internet-related task at once. Uploading a photo? Great. You will be doing so for a very long time and if you are planning on watching a YouTube video at the same time, you are just going to have to fucking wait. Want to watch Netflix streaming through the Wii? Okay, but you better CLOSE EVERY BROWSER WINDOW IN EXISTENCE.

Finally. Finally!!! in late 2010, I got an e-mail from AT&T saying that U-Verse was being rolled out in my neighborhood. Oh, happy day. I was super excited. So excited that the whole reason why I got that e-mail is because I had signed up to be notified once it became available. In late December, a regional manager came to my house twice (once when I was walking out the door to make an appointment and another time when I was at work) to talk to me about U-Verse and all it offered. I never quite understood why this young man did not leave a card with me, because I really wanted to talk to him about getting set up. But I suppose that’s neither here nor there.

I decided to go ahead and sign up online. I meticulously crafted the bundle that would work best for my household. I spent lots of time researching options and finally came up with something I thought would be perfect. I added services to my cart and went to the checkout. The site told me sorry, but my order could not be processed online, and that I’d have to call and talk to a human. Boo. So that’s what I did a few weeks later. In the interval, I got who knows how many e-mails and letters in the mail from AT&T, pleading with me to sign up for U-Verse. All the letters talked about the bundles of cash AT&T was dying to give me to sign up for the service. Honestly, I wasn’t even interested in that. I just wanted faster internet that wasn’t reminiscent of dialup speeds.

A very helpful saleswoman got on the horn when I called and helped me pick out the bundle I wanted. She was so super nice. That’s why when we got ready to check out and she came back from my “credit check”* and told me my installation fee, due immediately right there on the phone, was $449, I was taken completely aback. Did that include the first month’s bill? No. She was super excited, however, to tell me that I would get an $80 rebate after four weeks. I kept trying to get her to explain what charges added up to nearly $500 for a simple installation, but she could not make any sense to me, despite how nice she was being. She kept putting me on hold to “talk to her manager.” Huh. After balking again and again (and asking Twitter how much THEY had paid for their U-Verse install; the average response was “they paid ME!”), I realized that I was being taken for a ride.

Imagine that: A longtime customer comes to you to ask to pay you more money every month than she is paying now, and you respond by trying to bilk her out of half a mortgage payment up front.

And then! When she tells you she would like to see the offer in writing so that she can think about it, you refuse to send that to her.

And then!! When she tells you she needs to consult with her boyfriend to make sure they can cover the cost, you tell her that she needs to call her boyfriend while you are on the line, otherwise no deal.

I realize those things are probably in the sales handbook, which is why I again want to reiterate my overarching thesis: AT&T, PLEASE JUMP STRAIGHT UP MY ASS. ALL THE WAY UP THERE. DON’T BE SHY.

Adding supreme insult to injury are the (wasteful, spammy) letters pictured above, which just will not stop fucking showing up in my mailbox, even after I have tried TWICE and failed to get your precious U-Verse service. I get at least one a week. You want to give me $300 to sign up for U-Verse, huh? Is that AFTER I donate my kidney to your CEO? Is that in the fine print?

I am writing this letter so that perhaps someone with a soul in your company might see it and pause long enough to realize that treating your longtime customers like this is, oh, I don’t know, FUCKING ATROCIOUS? And should probably stop?

Anyway, I am canceling all my AT&T services as a result of this incident, not to mention your cumulative history of dicking me around. It’s something I should have done a long time ago. Sadly, I still have cell service with your company because I have an iPhone. But now that Verizon has entered the iPhone market, it shouldn’t be too long before you can scratch my name from your roll of huckleberries for good.

Your trampoline + my ass,
Lindsey Turner

*Before you go thinking this is something related to my credit, rest assured that my credit is good. Better than good. Great.

[Project 365]

9 thoughts on “Day 46/365: Dear AT&T”

  1. http://www.planetfeedback.com

    The responses from members are dickish and petty, so I wouldn’t even bother with all that, but posting your complaint there ensures that AT&T (and a lot of their customers) will see it. Anytime I’ve posted any kind of complaint there, I’ve recieved a response from the company within a few days, usually offering huge discounts or additional services, or a refund of what I’ve already spent.

  2. Dear Lindsey,

    You rule the known universe and all environs therein. Carry on.

    Love, grande

    —-

    Dear AT&T,

    When you find your way out of Lindsey’s lovely behind, come east a few miles and jump up my ample butt. There’s room for several of you in there to spend the weekend, including the incompetent tech who spent eight hours destroying all the land-based communication modes in my house only to tell me he “couldn’t figure out why this U-verse won’t take” and then disappeared for three days, forcing me to call a service operator — on my CELL PHONE — and learn that the account had been reported as “installed” and that I had already been billed for a month of service. Which is why we have Verizon and Earthlink now, you crooked goons.

    No love (never gonna get it), grande

  3. You are making me so glad that when I checked on Uverse I found out it isn’t available in my area…which is weird because my area is Memphis.

  4. @SS, I will check into it forthwith! (Is that a word?)

    @Grande, that would have made me baby-punching mad! ARGHHHH!

    @Marjorie, that makes some sense. It seems to be rolling out on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. I know people who got it months before I had access and they are mere blocks from me. The sad thing is that lots of people are happy with it. I’m sure it would have been a good fit for me. So the company fucked itself out of my business. So frustrating.

    @D&S YES! I have ad AT&T in some form for more than 10 years and have always paid my bill. Which is why I put scare quotes around it, because seriously? I think she just put me on hold so she could guffaw about the ridiculous amount she was going to try to charge me. It makes me wonder if she’s some kind of Comcast implant there, doing guerilla warfare and getting people to cancel their service right and left.

  5. Well, I have been considering changing my Internet service over from Comcast to AT&T, but there is no way in hell I’m going to do it now after reading this. It was supposedly going to be a bit cheaper, but seeing as how I can’t seem to get anyone to live chat with me to confirm this, and taking into account the hell you have been through, I’m not even going to bother calling. What kind of world are we living in when fucking Comcast is providing better customer service than another company??

  6. I had been an AT&T/Bellsouth customer for some 30 years when I first discovered they were hosing me. I has a calling card (You may not remember those) and I discovered on day that the use rate had been raised to 10 cents a minute. I paid about 3 cents at the time thru a land line. I called and asked about it and the response was like “Crap! he found out!”. I cancelled the card. Latest scam is AT&T is dropping the $5 discount for bundling service. I will fire back by cancelling basic land line long distance (~$5/month). I will never consent to direct pay because I want to see the bill. As you point out, there seems to be some built in inflation. I only hang around for the DSL email service which is quite good, but I’m sure some day they will slime me once to often….

  7. I’m in the same boat as Megan, I’ve though about jumping from Comcast to U-Verse if and when my neighborhood ever gets it (so I can get internet without being essentially forced to buy cable tv), but the horror stories like these that I keep hearing about AT&T have pretty well turned me off the idea.

  8. I think any cable/phone service can find ways to infuriate you with stupid hoops to jump through. We had Comcast for a couple of years, but after getting double charged for some sports packages with no offer to refund and crying at the huge bill after the introductory prices ended, we switched to Uverse. So far, so good. The installation wasn’t expensive, plus they sent me $250 in cash cards. Now I get more sports then I knew was possible, plus two HD receivers. So, perhaps it’s just your local salespeople that are dickweeds, and not the service in general.

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