Poor Dustin. AT&T won’t stop sending him junk mail at the wrong address. Sounds impossible, but one should never be too quick to judge with AT&T.

I have a situation which may interest you and for which I’m trying to find a little help. Essentially I have asked AT&T three times now to stop sending me junk mail and they keep sending me junk mail. The worst part is that it’s not even to my right address. The worse-than-worst part is that it’s for a service that isn’t offered at my address! Full story below.

Not long after I moved into my apartment, I noticed that I got a lot of junk mail on a regular basis. Thursday was local coupon day, Tuesday was national coupon day, and every couple weeks or so I would receive something from AT&T. Now, the strange part about this mail is that it is not even going to my correct address–my street number ends in ‘4’, this ends in ‘6’–but I get it anyway because the address they are addressing it to does not exist.

Well I didn’t know who to contact about the coupon circulars I get in the mail, but I knew for sure that I could contact AT&T. So I did, and politely asked them to stop mailing me any more items. They said, “Ok” and I thought that was that.

Until I received the next piece of AT&T junk mail in my mailbox. It happened a couple more times before I got around to calling (you can only speak with someone during business hours and I usually don’t get off work until after said hours). Again, they said, “No problem.” Sure enough, more junk mail keeps coming in. Repeat this scenario again and that’s where we stand now.

The most ironic part of all of this is that they are pushing the U-Verse service. Although I didn’t want to reward them for their tactics, I have to admit the service did look appealing, so I went online to check it out. I plugged in my real address and I got back the message that U-Verse wasn’t available in my area? What? Surely this is a mistake. I called them up to confirm and they told me that, yep, U-Verse is not available at my address ending in ‘4’. But what about the non-existent address whose mail I receive that ends in a ‘6’? Well, U-Verse is available at this imaginary place.

What do I do to get them to stop mailing me fliers I don’t want for a service I can’t get? Now that I’ve called them three times, is it time to ratchet it up? Is going to executive customer service even worth it for this kind of issue?

Thank you, Consumerist.

-Dustin

Maybe we’re jerks but we’d be tempted to call up and order the service anyway, pretending we lived at the “6” address. Then on the day the tech was supposed to show up, we’d write “6” real big with a sharpie on like, a paper plate (or something equally ridiculous) and hang it outside to lure the guy in. This isn’t a good idea or anything, it would just be funny.

Some other options:

1) Be like Ben. He calls and goes all Quentin Tarantino on his dentist, threatening to report them to the FTC. Meg is not really bothered by junk mail, because she enjoys using her paper shredder.

2) Try placing a big sign on your mailbox that says, “THIS IS NOT [whatever the incorrect address is] ” You could also try writing “Incorrect address” and “return to sender” on the mail and then dropping back in the mail. We’re not sure that this will actually do anything though. Any postal service employees care to offer some ideas that will actually work?

Anyone else have any ideas?

(Photo:hyku)

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