AT&T: Worst Company In The World

Early this year I decided to ditch my crappy cable company (Charter) for internet service. We cut the old BellSouth landline cord over five years ago, but AT&T is finally allowing dry-line DSL service in Atlanta (after claiming for a decade that it was technically impossible), so I figured I'd give them another shot. I called up the billing number, got what sounded like a great price on bundled service (we already had AT&T wireless thanks to the wife's iPhone), and signed up.

Boy, was that a mistake.

Since then, I would estimate that I've spent upwards of 20 hours on the phone with various Death Star minions. My billing has never once been correct; AT&T refused for months to live up to the DSL rates promised in my original sales call, and has repeatedly screwed up the discounts on the wireless side (I have a wireless service discount through my employer).

It took a certified letter to the CEO to get any action (for future reference, his direct email address is rs2982@att.com), and even now my bill is still screwed up. The executive case manager who's been handling the wireless side finally admitted that even he couldn't fix AT&T's billing system, and pushed through an advance credit to make up for the discount that I won't be receiving thanks to the Death Star's bureaucratic incompetence.

And even that credit, allegedly issued nearly a month ago, apparently hasn't gone through.

I've been hung up on, lied to, patronized, and even today flat-out insulted by phone reps, almost all of whom clearly could care less whether I'm satisfied with my service.

The most irritating thing of all is, every single AT&T employee I talk to tells me something diametrically opposed to the thing the last AT&T employee told me.

And that is why people hate AT&T. You don't want to give a discount or live up to an offer, fine. Don't offer them. You want to stick to your internal policies, that's also fine. But you don't say one thing and then do another, time and time and time and time again.

To Steve Jobs, the Leader, I beseech thee: for the love of Zod and my sanity, please ditch this awful company. I will be overjoyed to cut the Death Star loose approximately one micro-second after we're able to use our iPhones with a different provider.

(And yes, I know about unlocking iPhones and using them with T-Mobile. While I'd love to go back to them--I had fine service from T-M for years--that's not a wife-friendly option.)