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]

The Mail Center is running a little low on charm

I meant to write about this when it happened because I was PISSSSSSED and then life got in the way and what can you do.

But I need to write about it because it was so egregiously bad that Nick Fowler was even like, man, that was bad.

I went to the Mail Center on Madison in Midtown to ship a couple of things I’d sold on Etsy, including a 12×18 photo print that I was sending a second time since the first print had gotten bent a smidge when I shipped it before. (Protip: Successfully mailing large photos is more difficult that I could have ever imagined.)

As I was laying out my items to be shipped on the counter and inquiring about the size of no-bend mailer I was going to need (which they did not have, but assured me they could rig something up anyway), I noticed that somehow, during the drive over or before that, the new print had gotten bent on the edge. Totally my fault. I announced what had happened forlornly (“Oh noooo! This one’s bent too!”) and decided I would not be shipping that print. Here is where the Mail Center’s people took an opportunity to earn my loyalty and barfed on it.

First, the mustachioed employee glanced at the photo and asked me where I’d had it printed. I told him Costco, which has been my go-to printer for several weeks now after quite a bit of on- and offline research into the highest quality, most cost-effective places to get single photos printed on demand. (I’ve been very happy with Costco’s output and service.) Mustachioed man scoffed and said, “I’ve got a printer that will run circles around anything they’ve got.”

Bokay. Except I didn’t come in there with a problem with my print. My print looked great and he barely even glanced at it before insulting its quality. I asked him what sort of size dimensions that fancy-ass printer could accommodate and the pricing structure. He told me something about $8 per square foot. I told him what my print cost and he backed off a bit.

The blonde lady employee was on the outskirts of our conversation by then, moving in, and when she heard what was going on with my situation and realized I had a problem with my print and wouldn’t be mailing it, she chimed in, “Well, you get what you pay for!” Which, just … really, lady? Does your high-dollar printer print on unbendable paper that renders the person who paid for it incapable of accidentally fucking it up on the drive over? Because I would love to know how that works, exactly.

There were some other snitty comments made to me that I’ve forgotten. Their general attitude toward me was supremely shitty and arrogant. Upon leaving, Nick said, “Wow, those people were real assholes to you.” And I had gone in there thinking I was going to form a long and lasting (and lucrative, for them) shipping partnership with a local business, and was appropriately courteous from the get-go. I was completely blindsided by what appeared to be absolutely unprovoked assholery. In general, that sort of thing tends to be rare in this town, and I’m grateful for it.

Maybe this is just one of those quirky local businesses run by jerks where people go anyway, because it’s Just How They Are and We Love Them For It, but if you insult me right out of the gate and then fail to listen to or address my problem or offer me any solutions other than one cloaked in a shitty attitude, you can guarantee that I will never be back to your store, and I will tell everyone I possibly can about how you acted.