Phone Company Extortion

[Andara Bledin]

So, the company I work for has been attempting to get AT&T to honor a contract we have with them for about the last 20 years. We have yet to even get them to admit they owe us anything.

Well, except for a $20k+ credit that was on an account that they subsequently changed the number on and lost. >_<

So, the latest in a long line of douchebaggery from our 'favorite' telco: We got a registered letter this morning that says, essentially, "Oh, hi, we're finally upgrading our equipment to give you the service we promised to give you 20 years ago. As a result, all of the equipment you have won't work any longer and if you don't either buy our fantastically expensive piece of equipment at a usurious markup or sign another contract that we have no intention of honoring any more than the last, you'll stop having any sort of service at all on July 1. Have a nice day!"

I'd wonder if they were trying to get rid of us, but considering the massive number of man-hours they'd been dedicating to refusing to actually give us the service we've been paying for must be starting to add up.

^-.-^

[blas87]

Oh my dog, I HATE AT&T.

I have nothing else to add, except that I'm not surprised.

It all started with us when Cell One was bought by AT&T, and my parents went to the store to make sure that everything would change over alright, and the dumb bitch working there said that we were NOT AT&T customers.

[insertNameHere]

Ah got to love the wave of the future reason to have your equipment that works mostly fine upgraded for no fucking reason

[Andara Bledin]

Oh, it's better than that. Our equipment is new as of last year. There's absolutely no reason to force us to get new equipment other than to make us sign another contract, which will never happen.

^-.-^

[HYHYBT]

Stupid question, perhaps, but have you tried suing them?

[insertNameHere]

SO question..... Your already under a contract???? Which means THEY have an end of the bargin they need to hold up as much as you have to keep paying them to do whatever it is they are supposed to do, I can't see needing new equipment a year later, that is just piss poor planing

[Andara Bledin]

Actually, we're reporting them to the FCC. Again.

With how much money they manage to steal from people who just don't know any better, it's cheaper for them to pay fines and lawyer fees than to actually do the right thing.

Our current contract is a month to month obligation for service that they're too blindingly stupid to figure out that they aren't actually providing. Every time it seems like we're getting through our rep of the month, we get a brand new rep and have to start from the beginning because none of them have any idea what the hell is going on and none of them have ever left a single note, anywhere. Not that they'd be able to find them anyway, since they keep switching our account numbers (gone through about a dozen that we know of for what was supposed to only ever have one).

Our current rep is some prissy bitch who thinks she has all the answers and doesn't know jack shit... The Bosslady mentioned our outage issue, and she comes back with some canned response about a state-wide outage due to winter storms sometime last year.

If our Internet service was what it should have been, Bosslady would have sent copies of every last one of those 100+ outage messages to the stupid twat, but at the rate we usually get, it would have taken upwards of an hour to send, and likely would have been bounced on their side for size limitations.

And have you ever tried to not pay your phone/internet bill over contract issues?

It doesn't work. You pay the bill or you get cut off. If you're being overcharged, underserved, or they are otherwise screwing you over, you have to pay them and then fight to get your money back because otherwise, they'll just cut you off and they just don't care.

As for planning... We're really like to know how long this huge change has been in the works with them, because the first we heard about it was last week. It's going live on July 1, and they only saw fit to mention it to us now? I smell either a steaming pile of bullshit, or another blinding example of just how incompetent the lot of them are.

( for anyone who actually works for that soulless husk of a shitty corporation, you have my condolences and hope that you can find comparable work from a company that isn't so universally reviled )

^-.-^

[LexiaFira]

So, the latest in a long line of douchebaggery from our 'favorite' telco: We got a registered letter this morning that says, essentially, "Oh, hi, we're finally upgrading our equipment to give you the service we promised to give you 20 years ago. As a result, all of the equipment you have won't work any longer and if you don't either buy our fantastically expensive piece of equipment at a usurious markup or sign another contract that we have no intention of honoring any more than the last, you'll stop having any sort of service at all on July 1. Have a nice day!"

^-.-^

underwent/still undergoing as it ends may 31st and if we have any of our old phones under the company they bought out they will be obsolete as well. they sent us a chip to put in our new phone as it MAY work but if not we are welcome to purchase a new phone with a similar plan of what we had.

yeah no thanks. and because at&t has all about eliminated what was left of our old cell phone service in all but name to cancel our service we had to call a toll free number and it will be canceled on the next billing date which is fine as we figured we would have one more bill to pay. heh dad dropped the house line last month and went with a better deal and at&t sent him a manila envelop sized letter which basically was an attempt to get him to come back. dad just laughed and tossed it. because we get the same if not better service that at&t gave at much better price without hidden bs in the bill

[BlaqueKatt]

Every time it seems like we're getting through our rep of the month, we get a brand new rep and have to start from the beginning because none of them have any idea what the hell is going on and none of them have ever left a single note, anywhere. Not that they'd be able to find them anyway, since they keep switching our account numbers (gone through about a dozen that we know of for what was supposed to only ever have one).

Our current rep is some prissy bitch who thinks she has all the answers and doesn't know jack shit...<mr snippy was here>
( for anyone who actually works for that soulless husk of a shitty corporation, you have my condolences and hope that you can find comparable work from a company that isn't so universally reviled )

^-.-^

um I used to work specifically for the Managed internet service dept(which is only businesses-so probably who you're stuck dealing with), the company I worked for(we were an outsource), had been doing the work for over 15 years, heck we literally wrote the policies and procedures for how to deal with disputes and billing issues, not to mention setting up accounts. Problems started to surface when bellsouth bought them out. See we had things running pretty well-customers with difficult accounts/contracts were assigned to a single person, and we knew the ins and outs of their contracts, service agreements, set ups etc. Well we also got paid around $12 per hour, because AT&T knew we were worth it, simply for our knowledge base(no one at AT&T knew how to do anything we did, and they didn't care because we did a pretty good job). The bean counters at bellsouth, didn't like the expense, so they pulled the contract, not realizing WE owned the information, procedures, policies, etc. They went with a company they could pay $7 an hour for, and had zero information about what they were supposed to be doing*. And the "new" company had to start from scratch, and they have a horrible turnover rate due to massive amounts of jackassery all in the name of saving a few bucks. And the new company, saw no reason to assign difficult accounts to just one person, as they have a horrible hemorrhage of employees-whereas we had a turnover rate of less than 2%.

So I am so sorry you have to deal with the incredible amount of shortsightedness greed created.

*we offered to train them at the wage of $25/hour. and the guy that wrote the processes(yup just one single guy), offered to sell them for $500,000, they said nope-so we said "screw you!" Many of their customers left for sprint and verizon over it. I had customers track down my personal cell phone number to find out what was going on, as we weren't allowed to tell them. though it was vaguely amusing to have an AT&T sales rep try to find me a job in AT&T because one of her clients refused to work with anyone else(seriously I was mentioned by name in the company contract)

[Andara Bledin]

And it gets better.

I overheard the bosslady having a bit of a rant with another woman who does some contract work for us and rents out one of our spare offices to do her own business out of.

It turns out that the fancy equipment they want us to pay for isn't even required to get service. All of the equipment we already have will work just fine regardless of whatever changes they're making, but if we don't have it in place, they'll just refuse to provide us with service until we put one in. >_<

Oh, AT&T, how I, and my bosses, loathe thee.

^-.-^

[insertNameHere]

^
So, the new system is backwards compatible, I guess they are so fucking stupid that they had the bright idea to tell everyone they need to upgrade, as MANY companies would likely comply. Then they stuck with the Lie so well that they refuse to admit the "old" equipment will work. and they are risking losing an account over something I guess is really a NON ISSUE, because your equipment will work, I guess find out if someone intelligent can provide you services.

[Andara Bledin]

And the fun just never ends with these guys.

New info from the saga of AT&T's sucktacularity.

A tech called in today to let us know that one of our T1 lines was down. Yeah, that's not news. Then he let us know that it actually has been down since Sunday. That's new. He asked if we'd done anything to change our setup, maybe changed our settings. Well, we hadn't, but wouldn't you know, the AT&T people had been in and done some adjusting themselves. We can't say if it's incompetence or sabotage, but they've looped one of our incoming data lines so that it is essentially non-functional.

So we tell the tech that it doesn't matter anyway since we're dropping them like a maggot-infested pile of offal due to their demand that we buy their expensive equipment or sign a new three-year contract. Now, you'd think that a tech that was actually part of their maintenance department would be savvy to new equipment requirements that are supposedly going into effect in 2 months, wouldn't you? He'd never heard of it, and asked that we send him a copy of the letter so he could have a chat with his people. He also commented that he'd never heard of them sending out a letter like that.

And, finally, the icing on the spectacular cake of fail. We got another email from the smarmy bitch who knows all. She wanted to let us know, in as condescending manner as one can manage in an email, that we do not have a dedicated T1 line for our phone service. Which is really funny, because we've been paying for a dedicated T1 line for our phones for at least the last 10 years. Again, we have no way to tell if the woman is just completely off her nut and has no idea what she's doing, or if AT&T has (again) been charging us for service that they've never actually provided. That disappearing credit I mentioned earlier was for several months worth of charges for phone lines that never existed, and at least one that belonged to a neighbor who was also paying for the service.

Is there any question as to why we're leaving them as fast as we can sign a contract with a new provider?

^-.-^

[blas87]

Once again, I feel for you and everyone you work with. My mother never dealt with a decent rep the entire time we were with AT&T. The only reason we never left right away is because of what it costs to break a contract.

When for the SECOND time, they'd "lost" a payment and shut off all of our phones, refused a copy of my mother's bank statement showing the payment and demanded payment to be turned back on (we had to pay BOTH times to be turned back on!), my mom got a rep who was so apathetic, when my mom said that they really need to learn better customer service and as soon as our contract was up, forget them, and whatnot, the lady just kept saying "Uh huh".

Add that to the bitch who said we were not AT&T customers, to the first rep who actually argued with my mom about whether she'd paid or not, to the sup who refused a copy of the bank statement, to the false charges they put on all of our bills and wouldn't take off.......to the second instance of being shut off and once again, refusing proof of payment or a tracking number, and not even caring that they were going to lose customers................fuck them all.

[MadMike]

fuck them all.

I feel the same way. I had them as my long distance provider for many years, and never had a problem with them. In fact, I rarely make long distance calls, so I spent very little money on them.

Then one day, I get a bill from them that doesn't make any sense. There are no calls on it, but it's for some new calling plan that I did not ask to be placed on, and one that made no financial sense to me because of how rarely I make long distance calls. I emailed them about it, and they claimed they notified me that they were putting me on the new plan, and there was nothing they could (or wanted to) do about it.

I replied back telling them fine, I'll pay the bill, but to make sure this doesn't happen again I'm switching to a different provider. As soon as I fired off the email, I did just that.

A few months later, I got an offer in the mail from them, trying to get me to switch back. I tossed it in the trash with the rest of the junk. They had their chance to keep me as a customer, and they chose instead to fuck me over. They can go to hell.