Mistakes happen, and they sometimes require a little time to fix. But Consumerist reader Clay says that AT&T took its good old time getting around to fixing its mistake, and even then it still managed to screw up the fix — and charge Clay for the hassle.

Back on Sept. 22, Chicago resident Clay received a call from an employee at an AT&T store in Dallas that he had mistakenly entered Clay’s cell number, instead of his customer’s, into the system.

“Apparently my account had been transferred to someone else’s account and I no longer existed in their system,” Clay tells Consumerist. “I told him I understood that mistakes do happen, but please resolve as soon as possible and confirm when it’s fixed.”

That same day, the AT&T employee he spoke to on the phone wrote him an e-mail confirming the error and promising to resolve the mistake “in a timely manner.”

But it wasn’t until 16 days later, on Oct. 8, that Clay finally received confirmation that his account had been reestablished. Everything appeared normal, that is until earlier this week when he got his first bill since his account was supposedly fixed.

“Not only did the Dallas office fail to add my corporate discount, they also gave me a tiny data plan instead of my unlimited data plan,” says Clay. “On top of that they charged me an $18 fee to transfer the service to a new account… So now they’re charging me for their mistake?”

Clay says he had to spend two hours in a Chicago AT&T store, where his issue had to be escalated to phone support, to get everything back to what it had been before the screw-up. At least the people he dealt with this time were equally aghast at the handling of Clay’s account by the folks in Dallas.

Even though the people in the Chicago office were extremely helpful, after more than a month of bad customer service, Clay tells Consumerist that the last month of hassle “will most likely result in me changing my service to a new provider the first chance I get.”

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