"That wouldn't surprise me"

I appreciate the honesty of the super, but hope that he also provided a suggestion on how Scott would proceed when the bill arrived.

This kind of crap usually isn't the company blatantly defrauding you, it's the result of cheap labor. It seems like every single company would rather pay a dumb ass $7 an hour than a semi-intelligent person at $9/hour.

Wait, wait. There was a bill? What happened with the bill? It's like getting half a story!

@cuchanu: Pay a semi-intelligent person who is far more efficient, makes fewer mistakes, and doesn't make your customers hate you and leave. Or pay someone a bit less, have them be half as efficient as the higher paid person, cause far more mistakes and lose you many customers.

Sometimes I just don't get CEO logic. Well, actually I do. Some pin head thought some of these decisions were a great new way to squeeze a few more pennies of profit but ignored the other side of the equation. They promote it up the food chain at work and ta-da.

@pecan pi: Well, maybe get them for mail fraud? Asking for money for a product they never provided

@DemolitionMan: Making up the ends of stories is always interesting...it's what Fox News does all the time!

"No 'mater'?" What does his mother have to do with it?

@MyPetFly:

Sorry, I forgot the ;) to show I was just pulling his leg.

Psst-- Chris -- I think maybe you mean "amalgam" rather than "alchemy", but maybe you're just taking poetic license, since navigating the depths of AT&T Customer Service would take a very high-level magician indeed?

@Antediluvian: I was using it in this way:
[wordnetweb.princeton.edu]

@Antediluvian: hmm, but then I added a bunch of other ingredients into the mix. I see the problem.

*chews bottom lip*

I think I should change it.
Curse you for your editing skillz!!! (Thx)

Be sure and tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!

@Chris Walters: Oh, please. :-)
And you're welcome to take issue with anything I write in my blog any day of the week!

Once I actually get off my ass and write a blog, rather than just nitpicking the work of others.

Either way, I'm glad you're back.

He should check and make sure this is not some sort of elaborate scam.

1. Send out fliers for non-existent plan with scam number.
2. Tell them they need to pay the first month in advance.
3. ???
4. Profit

I had Cavalier Telephone for my residential service back in 2001. I called Customer Service in December to schedule a move the following February.
The morning of New Year's Eve, the phone cut off in my old apartment. After two hours on hold (which cost a fortune on the cellphone plan I had at the time), I found out that they were unable to schedule anything into the next year... so my disconnect had fallen on the last day of December. They managed to get it turned back on about two days later.
When I got the dial tone back, I suddenly realized the other half of this clusterf**k. I drove to the new apartment, convinced the super to let me in (it was empty: they were painting it), and plugged in a phone... to find a dial tone, connected to the new number they had promised me.

I called them up (two more hours), explained the other half of their error, and told them to completely cancel my order. Of course, Cavalier billed me for three days of phone service in the empty apartment... it took three weeks to get them to cancel that bill.

Now THIS is a situation where you need to sue for mail fraud! If they are billing you for a nonexistent service, that's a crime.

I stopped reading after I read the part about him "excitedly buying an iphone". Sometimes we bring trouble upon ourselves.

(im going to get disemvoweled, arent i?)

I signed up for AT&T phone & internet service only to find out later that it wasn't actually available in my area as well. I also received bills. Month after month they kept coming, and every time I would call, speak with a CSR, and be told that they figured out the problem, my account was cancelled, and not to worry about the bill.

Of course, every month it came again - oh and there were never any records of my previous calls. I asked to speak with a supervisor and they always claimed that one would have to call me back - no one ever did. Once I told a CSR that I knew that no supervisor would call and that I wasn't hanging up until someone fixed this problem for me - he hung on me!

Finally after about six months, hours of calling, and a letter from a collections agency (!!!), I got a CSR with half a brain and a conscience. She spent almost an hour on the phone with me trying to figure out the mess. Finally she told me that the problem was that someone had accidentally canceled the phone service before the internet service. Apparently if you cancel the phone service first the internet service gets lost in the black hole that is AT&T's computer system, never to be found again (except during the billing cycle).

Thankfully this wonderful woman actually did help me and I managed to call of the dogs at the collections agency as well. I will NEVER be doing any kind of business with AT&T again.

Don't pay the bill and let AT¶T cancel his non-service. This is truly Zen in everyday life.

Yeah, a few years ago I tried to get DSL through ATT. I signed up, they shipped out the self install kit and started billing me. I installed the kit and didnt get a connection.

Turns out they dont offer DSL in my neighborhood, but it took me 2 months to convince them of that and to take back the hardware and refund my service.

I actually found out through one of their DSL resellers that I was about 200 ft past the max for DSL service. So if an ATT reseller could tell me that info instantly, whey couldnt ATT?

ATT states that they don't provide bills to his area and there's no record of ever sending one.

@zaq2g:

DSL sucks like that, yes.

They could tell your distance via the statistics the DSLAM (or, much more rarely nowadays, CO) was telling them while your modem attempted to sync. He was likely making a (very if he could get it into the 100s of feet range) informed guess based on SNR vs. Attenuation.

Until your modem was hooked up, there was nothing on the other end to tell them you were out of range. Most DSL ordering would be done based on DSLAM/CO vs. Phone Number or address. If you're on that DSLAM (or CO, as it may be) it all looks good. You plug in the modem and when it tries to establish a connection everyone knows how far away you are.

The only other way is to send a tech out to measure loop voltage/resistance, and that's expensive (not to mention I bet a lot of techs can't figure out how to do it).

BTW: You might have been able to squeeze out a 256 kbits signal if you plugged the modem straight into your demarc. Not that that is very good, you're better off letting AT&T give up on you in that case. :)

BTW: You can get those stats out of any (decent--I recommend the ST516 and 2700HG for price, myself) modem yourself, just in case you have DSL again in your lifetime. They are handy for trying to improve your wiring. Of course, you're best of just hooking your modem up at the demarc anyways and centrally filtering your phones from there... It's also handy in case the phone company suggests your internal wiring is the reason your DSL doesn't work. Unplug ALL your internal wiring with a single "click" and you can prove them wrong.

Yes, I did DSL internet support and was a cable tech (networking, though, not telecomms) for quite a while.

@Cliff_Donner: See, THAT'S why I don't hitchhike.

@nbs2: Yeah, it does kind of come off as "Sucks to be you" otherwise.

One department cannot see all of the information AT&T has about an individual customer. There's no unified, single customer view for sales and support agents to utilize.

Well, why not? Wouldn't it be easier to make sales that way?

@shepd: They did this to me once. I got an advertsiement in the mail, called, and they said they'd send a technician out. A week passes and I haven't heard anything, so I call and am on hold for 30 minutes while they look into it. I guess a technician did come, and determined he couldn't hook me up as the service wasn't offered in my area. Rather than call and tell me, I guess they just waited for me to call them. They told me they'd cancel my account, but a month later I got a bill for TV and internet. I called, again on hold for 30 minutes, and they said they'd reverse the charge and cancel the account. A month after that, I got another bill, this one with a late fee assessed for not paying the first one. Called back again, on hold for 30-40 minutes until I spoke with a manager who was determined to send another technician out, but eventually listened to what I was saying and canceled my account.

I still get advertisements in the mail to this day. Why advertise in a place you KNOW doesn't have service?

@adamczar:

I still get advertisements in the mail to this day. Why advertise in a place you KNOW doesn't have service?

I can help here, too! :-)

DSL service, being limited to loop length, is spotty in many area. In my town you can be located right in downtown and while every single neighbour will qualify for DSL service, you won't. I have seen that SO MANY times. It's because of how the lines were originally strung. Most of the places that couldn't get DSL service in a so-called served region were of a particularly different vintage of home than their surroundings. Tracing their phone line reveals their house is connected to a totally different DSLAM or CO than their neighbours, which involves a long loop length.

The reason for that is because if the house was built far earlier then its neighbours (or got telephone service far earlier) the line was run to the nearest CO, which could have been several miles away. As time goes on, more people move into town and build houses and want phone service and Bell has a good reason to build a new CO, and eventually, some SLAMs, to save on copper (or, nowadays, offer DSL). And so, you have this one house sitting there with crap service due to old, extremely long lines and the neighbours all get great service. The only way to fix that is to figure out a way to pay Bell to rewire you to something closer. Good luck, even offering money to Bell doesn't seem to get things done.

Same thing can happen with a house built on a vacant lot in a gentrified area. All the homes there may be wired to a local exchange that has hit maximum load due to Bell never expecting the area to be popular. So, your line gets run somewhere stupid to get you a dialtone from a switch that is NOT overloaded, resulting in a long loop and no DSL.

Since these would be isolated cases, usually involving no more than, say, an entire side-street (that's what I would usually see), and most blanket advertising is done based on geographical area (where I am by the last couple of digits of your postal code, for you probably by zip code) there's no easy way to *not* deliver the ads to you, since as far as the phone company is concerned *someone* in our postal region can get the service... While your individual address is printed on the ad, it isn't billed that way since bulk mail discounts usually only apply to mailings to entire regions (eg: Cover 90210 for only $0.09 per house! Add in rental communities for only $0.05! Yes, mailing/billing can be done based on ownership status of your residence.)

:) HTH!

As far as billing goes, can't help you there, totally different country and company (no AT&T up here).

@shepd: Ah, well, the mailing issue makes sense I suppose. Thanks for explaining. Still, this is an apartment complex I'm talking about, so for some reason I think about it differently.

Wow this sounds so familiar. I had a very similar, INFURIATING experience with AT&T last summer. Just thinking about it sends me into a state of panic and fury.

@cuchanu: Semi-intelligent people don't want to work in phone centers.

@cuchanu: It seems like they could use your standard mouth-breather if they just implemented some intelligent automation. It sounds like their computer systems need a major update.

@Cliff_Donner:
OMG, I was just thinking about that, creepy!

@Davan: No phone is worth $2k ( over 2 years before overages and additional add-ons ).

Don't take any guff off these clowns if they want to give you the run around.
Tell them hey, if you cannot assist me with my problem, that's ok, let's find someone who can.

If they continue to do so, drop the hammer with a complaint with the PUC.

I just had to deal with AT&T to try to get my DSL service restored, and the "silo" theory explains why it was such a fiasco. Every time I'd call, I had to start from scratch with the CSR - yes, it's plugged in, and yes, I've tried rebooting, etc. Then the CSR would give me a ticket number, and the person would call back on my cell, when I was away from the phone, and I'd call back later, only to start over. On my fourth call, CSR gave me yet another ticket number and stated someone would call me back. I said to the CSR, who was Indian, "Now let me get this straight. I need to keep calling, only to reach yet another person who cannot solve my problem?" Apparently she had not yet attended the "Understanding American Sarcasm" module in Bangalore. "Um, thank you for calling AT&T" was her answer.

@pecan pi: I too feel cheated for an ending...

@ageshin: Um, I don't know about The New AT&T!, but Bellsouth used to pursue even small collections. I let a bill slide in 1999 because -- it's boring. Suffice to say that a Bellsouth employee acted in bad faith. I *still* have a collection on my credit report *now* because their crooked-ass collection agency keeps pretending I haven't paid them and refiling the collection as if it was recent.

More succinctly: No, get them to fix it.

@Davan: A man can dream! I'll probably join you. :P

What you didn't see was when he called back to protest the bill, them insisting that they ARE providing service, and telling him to take a leap and sending it to a collection agent.

@Cliff_Donner: The Alamo doesn't have a basement! Wahahahahah!

@Rectilinear Propagation: Because the government told them to.

When Ma'Bell was broken up by antitrust laws in 1984 the government put alot of restrictions on how the Baby Bells could could act internally. In the 1990's, Telephone "deregulation" allowed the baby Bells to enter the long distance market in exchange for allowing other companies to use thier lines to sell local service. The "deregulation" also included alot of new stricter rules on how the baby Bells could share information inside the company.

Most of the retrictions have expired in the last year or two as they have been somewhat moot by telephone from cable and VOIP, but a system that was built up over 25 years takes a while to undo.

@cuchanu: Maybe your dictionary is different from mine. Sending someone an offer in the mail for a service you don't and can't provide, accepting their order, and billing them for it. Sounds like fraud to me.

@Davan: Not only that, he bought the iPhone "several years earlier" ...

In what universe does 18 months = "several years" ???

From 1991 to '93 I lived in Italy. I had an AT&T "calling card" to use whenever I called the US. I cancelled the account (and card) upon my return in late 1993, and I thought that would be that. Nope.

I continued to receive month bills for 16 cents, 29 cents, 32 cents (etc.) for years. I repeatedly called AT&T to stop these ridiculous charges and each time was assured they would stop. I wasn't using their services and the charge I received each month was some silly service fee + tax (15 cent service, 5 cent tax...for example). The fees would accumulate, then mysteriously go back to zero after a few months. No one was paying this bill incidentally.

This article helps explain how one AT&T rep. could assure me the billing would stop and a month later I would still receive the 29 cent bill, like clockwork. Idiocy.

They finally did stop charging me in 2003. Happy ending...I never paid a dime in those 9 years and it never has had any effect on my credit (or even mentioned on my credit report).

@calquist: But they will in this economy.

"when I purchased the first generation iPhone, which only AT&T was smart enough to support."

too bad Verizon doesn't use GSM technology that the iPhone runs. For Apple to make the iPhone a global product, they didn't really have much choice other than to make it GSM.

So its not really a matter of smartness as much as a technology difference.

@zaq2g:
Dunno if at&t is still doing that, but that scenario of selling a DSL package without actually verifying if service is available for that address was very common. Maybe it still is, it wouldn't surprise me.

This reminds me a little of what i'm dealing with now with at&t. I moved from Chicago to Tulsa, OK last November. I ported one of my two land line numbers to Vonage, and didn't need the other one.

Once the number port was complete, I called AT&T to confirm with them that ALL my landline service in Chicago was to be terminated effective Dec. 1, 2008.

They are still billing me for the one number that I didn't port to Vonage. I've called four times, the last time they told me to wait one more billing cycle. And that was after getting bounced to three different reps over 45 minutes. The last rep asked me for the "number in question", and then before I had a chance to say anything else, told me I "had a balance due of $70.43, how would I like to pay for that". Needless to say, I laughed pretty hard (a tactic for avoiding expletives).

In the meantime, I'm getting eBill e-mails telling me about my balance.

I think that I actually overpaid, and am due a credit.

The wheels turn S-L-O-W-L-Y at the old Telco, don't they?

@mwwilk: I cancelled my AT&T cellphone plan once I was out of contract, and every month would get a bill for 0.00. I was worried so I called, and they verified that the account was cancelled.... but the monthly 'bills' kept coming, for more than 2 years. I eventually moved and decided to not forward my mail.... maybe they finally got the message.