I am not a happy camper. AT&T has outdone itself in corporate idiocy.
My first and only Internet service provider, for nearly 20 years, was AT&T. I finally succumbed to the siren song of being able to upload and download photos without having to leave my computer running and logged onto a dial-up connection all night, so I stopped by an AT&T storefront to inquire about upgrading my AT&T dial-up service to AT&T DSL. The sales dweeb assured me there would be no problem, and that he could even save me some money. Cool. I told him to go ahead. I also explained to him that I have a 2-line system in my house, that there are three wall phones, and six desk sets. The standard DSL kit only included one wall filter and four desk set filters. He assured me that it was all taken care of, that he would have the additional filters sent right to my house. I also mentioned that, as a result of buyouts and mergers, I was getting both local and long distance service for both lines from AT&T but they were all being billed separately. I asked if he could arrange to have it all consolidated into one bill, and gain he said it was all taken care of.
LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE!
Months later, I was still getting multiple bills. I had my wife's computer running on the DSL but, due to a vague feeling of dread, I held off doing my own until last week. Last week I took the plunge -- and immediately found that I have NO e-mail for two different accounts. I have one e-mail account on a private server provided by an Internet forum I'm a moderator for. That account runs on Outlook Express, and I was able to receive but not send. My AT&T account (my primary account for both personal and business e-mail) used to run on Thunderbird, but that's academic because the account has simply vanished.
Calls to tech support, of course, went to New Delhi or Islamabad. The people on the other end can barely read their scripts, and when that doesn't work they are WORSE than clueless. After an hour of "helping," the young lady had managed to muck up the settings on the forum e-mail so that it wouldn't either send OR receive. She thereupon fell back on "It's not our problem, you have to ask the server what to use for settings." Never mind that it was functioning flawlessly for two years until the switch to DSL, she insisted the problem was on the server's end.
For the AT&T account? Oh, that's an OLD account. Yeah, I know. In fact, it's like 15 or 20 years old, so what? Well, it seems I had to call a different support number for that. So I did. And the support person on that line suggested that they could "reactivate" my e-mail for $7.95 per month. Huh? Reactivate? And then he said I owe $60 on the account and he needed a credit card number to pay the past due amount.
That was news to me, since my Internet service is included on my phone bill and I haven't missed any phone bill payments for awhile.
What I finally figured out is that AT&T is not AT&T. Yes, I knew that the baby swallowed the mama and that SBC had bought AT&T and then adopted the AT&T name. But -- my Internet service has always been with AT&T. I signed up with AT&T. The bills have always come from AT&T. AT&T sent me offers to "upgrade" my AT&T dial-up service to AT&T DSL service. And yet -- it seems the various entities within AT&T are so divorced that they don't regard my "upgrade" as an upgrade at all. They are treating me just as if I was a new customer migrating over from Sprint or some cable Internet provider, so even though my e-mail address has ended with "@ATT.NET" for 15 or more years -- they expect me to pay a surcharge for the privilege of keeping the same e-mail address.
Oh, yeah -- and the new e-mail ID they assigned me, in order to get my "new" AT&T e-mail up and running? It doesn't work. It seems that before it can be activated it needs to send a code to my old e-mail address for me to enter in the configuration setup routine. But, of course, they've terminated the old account and it doesn't exist, so I can't receive the activation code for the new e-mail ID. Catch-22!
Oh, yeah -- the phones. Naturally, the additional filters never showed up. Which is probably a good thing, since the ones in the kit were all single line filters with only two contacts in the housing, and the 2-line phone system needs four conductors. Had to buy filters for the desk phones at Lowe's. And the filter for the wall phone? The AT&T provided wall phone filter would not work with an AT&T wall phone, so I had to buy a cheapie replacement at Staples. And then I had to buy two additional wall phone filters at Radio Shack for the other two wall phones.
Is this any way to run an airline?
