CHAPTER ONE

In the checkout line of a national clothing retailer a young woman in her early 20’s is ringing a cash register.  Built to the rough physical dimensions of a double-door refrigerator, she is attired in a sleeveless, low-cut top that is three sizes too small and ten years out of style.  Her make-up has most certainly been applied with a cement trowel.  On her head is a rat’s nest of jet-black hair, violated by random streaks of maroon and fluorescent green.  She wears enough cheap jewelry to send an industrial strength metal detector into meltdown.  Studs protrude unnaturally from several places on her face.  An amorphous blob of tattoos is visible.  Absolutely nothing about this woman falls into the realm of subtle. 

While putting on a disinterested and utterly mechanical display of waiting on customers, she carries on a conversation with what are assumed to be friends who are milling nearby.  Her voice is rough-hewn and loud.  Several customers decide they don’t really need their intended purchases and quietly head for he door.  Others see their transactions through.  Looks of amusement, distress and disbelief battle for supremacy.    

Day in and day out we are head-butted with examples – often glaring in their totality – of poorly designed and more poorly executed customer service.  From grumpy wait staff to surly salespeople; from bored bank tellers to cashiers with your money in one hand and a cell phone in the other; from call center reps you can’t understand to automated service lines that leave you on hold for days, we are subjected on a continual basis to teeth-gnashing lessons on how not to run a business.

The Nightmare on Register 3 was found in a chain that operates all over the country, so we might assume that she was not a poster child for normal corporate hiring or training efforts.  In that regard, sometimes the problems that we as customers encounter are born of dire circumstances or temporary disasters.  For example, maybe the entire staff of that store came down with dysentery that day.  Maybe aliens kidnapped them all, and the manager had no option but to use Ms. Rocky Horror or close up for the night.  Desperate times, and all that. 

But sometimes we run into companies that provide horrendous service, not because of anything dire or temporary, but because they can; because if their customers don’t like the service they get, they have few options or alternatives in terms of where else they can take their money.  The airline industry as a whole, which seems to take perverse joy in testing just how many ways they can inflict misery on their customers, is a fair example there.  The same can be said for enterprises like cable and satellite TV providers, the postal service, one or two nameless but well known software conglomerates, oil companies and the legislative branches of nearly every government on the planet (to name just a few), all of whom enjoy near (if not total) monopolistic protection, and who thus seem to share the common belief that customers exist to serve them, not the other way around. 

For the past eight months I’ve been dealing with one such company on an up-close and personal basis.  A company that is so big, so well established and so supremely confident of its infallibility and indestructibility that they appear to have lost the incentive to even pretend that they give a rat’s behind what anyone thinks of them.  Pick your poison and I’ve seen it from them; administrative ineptitude, technical incompetence, wacko billing practices, ignorance, stupidity, finger-pointing and evasive obfuscations of responsibility.  All in all, the kind of bureaucratic bungling one would more commonly associate with the likes of Moe, Larry and/or Curley.  Not only does the right hand not have any idea what the left hand is doing in this company, the right hand doesn’t even know it is indeed the right hand.       

I was recently in Lake George, NY for a couple of days, and while cruising the local shops and stores, I ran across a ubiquitous presence of t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, coffee mugs and other tourist paraphernalia emblazoned with the following:

DILLIGAF?

Mystified over what it represented, but impressed by the number of display racks on which it resided, and the number of items on which it had been placed, I finally asked a store clerk what it meant.  He smilingly explained that it’s an acronym developed by a local guy. 

“What does it stand for?” I asked. 

“It stands for, Do I Look Like I Give  _  __? “ he grinned.  I’m betting you can fill in the blanks yourself. 

After I quit laughing, I soon realized that what was probably meant to be a bit of tongue in cheek satire was also an apt description of the modus operandi of the company with whom I’ve been running around in circles for months. 

Hey guys, this is not the service you agreed to provide me!
Oh really?  DILLIGAF?

And while we’re at it, this is also not the price we agreed you would charge!
Yeah?  DILLIGAF?

Don’t you people get it?  We had a deal.  You are not living up to it!
So?  BFD!  DILLIGAF?

Okay, I embellished that last one.  But you get the idea. 

Meanwhile, faced with a continuing saga that refuses to be resolved and won’t go away, and given an ongoing display of corporate ineptitude that I can’t even believe is possible, let alone happening, I’ve decided to share my experience with others. 

This will not be a quick tale, because as this first page is written, the final outcome remains unknown.  It has been underway for over eight months, and every time I dare to hope that the end might be in sight, it is pushed further away by the combined ravages of both galactic incompetence and an undying devotion to the spirit of DILLIGAF?  I have no idea how many more twists and turns there are going to be, or whether the mess that this company has created will be resolved in my lifetime. 

On that note, perhaps I should introduce you to the name of this company. 

You may have heard of it. 

It calls itself AT&T.

CHAPTER TWO

My story begins in March of 2009.  Ironically, AT&T wasn’t even directly sitting at the table when it all began.

My first step down what quickly became a very slippery slope began with a company called Total Communications, Inc. – TCI for short – out of East Hartford, CT.  The initial discovery that I shared space in the universe with these folks was the arrival of the first of several letters, all providing dire warnings that my contract with them was expiring, and implying that as a result, if I failed to take swift and decisive action, telecommunication life as I knew it was about to end.  Inasmuch as I was at the time unaware that I had any sort of contract with them, expiring or otherwise, and was of a general mind to stare down the fates, their letters were all summarily dispatched to the circular file.

Then one day one of their reps, a nice enough but relatively clueless chap by the name of Kevin, caught up with me by telephone.  I must have been feeling charitable that day because at the end of a brief conversation, I agreed to a ten-minute meeting in my office.       

TCI is, for lack of a better term, an agent of AT&T.  That label is one of my choosing because frankly, I’m not at all clear what the precise nature of the relationship is.  Reseller?  Franchisee?  Subsidiary?  Indentured servant?  Contractual hired gun?  I’m afraid if Kevin ever explained it, it didn’t sink in.  

However, by whatever economic tether the two companies are bound, his conceptual explanation was that TCI is a seller of AT&T services.  In this case, Centralink Service, which is to say, local phone service.   

I thanked Kevin for the explanation, leaned back in my chair, considered him appraisingly, and then finally said, “And you are assuming all of this is a matter of interest to me because…………….?”

Well, imagine my surprise when part of his answer revealed that I had signed up with TCI years before, about the time I had purchased a new phone system.  Evidently the contract was dropped into a file, never again saw the light of day, and that was the sum total of the relationship.  My bill came from AT&T each month, and I had no reason to ever again recall that TCI even existed.

Which begged the unavoidable question, “Given your company’s rock solid impersonation of the invisible man, what do I need TCI for after all these years?  I mean, what do you bring to the table that I can’t get, and haven’t gotten, directly from AT&T?”

“Well,” he enthusiastically replied, “Our role is to be your service and support liaison.  If you find you have, for example, troubleshooting or repair needs, if you want to discuss plan changes or upgrades, or maybe if you have billing questions……whatever you may need, you just give us a call and we’ll take care of it.  No bureaucracy, no sitting on hold; call us and we’ll cut through the red tape and take care of things for you.  And it doesn’t cost you anything.”

Hmmmm! 

I drifted for a moment, mentally revisiting the routine of past interactions with AT&T.  Call a toll-free number, get abused by some mechanical voice recognition savant, grow old while being bombarded with excruciatingly bad music, be assured every two minutes by an obsequious disembodied voice that my call is important and, if I don’t die on hold, someone will be with me as soon as possible.  And then finally, at long last, the call is answered, and I reach someone on the other side of the world who is either an idiot, or has been trained to treat me like an idiot, in either case, by reading a script in a language that sounds suspiciously like English.

At which time they tell me I’ve called the wrong number.

And the origins of road rage become clear to me.       

Yet here was a sales rep telling me he could make all of that go away, and it would cost me nothing.

What’s not to like?

I almost fell over myself to sign up.  

“Excellent,” Kevin says with a big grin that tells me his commission check was already being sized up.  Then he leaned forward with a look I’d seen before.  The look that said time to go for the gold.  “Let me ask you another question,” he moved in for the kill.  “If I could show you how to save money by switching your long distance to AT&T, would you be interested in seeing the numbers?”

If this had been a movie, it was at that very point that eerie music would have begun playing in the background.  Maybe a dark object would have passed in front of the sun as flocks of birds frantically flew south.  The indistinct outline of a knife-wielding maniac would have appeared in the shadows.  There would have been a warning, an omen of some kind, something that would have prompted me to view his question with the same regard I’d give an email from the Bank of Nigeria.

But alas, there was no warning.  Worse, it was early 2009.  The economy was still falling apart, the Dow was still flushing itself down the toilet, and even a hint of being able to save a few bucks was, it seemed, worthy of attention.

So, I agreed to hear what he had to say and he painted a picture that I couldn’t deny was attractive.  Decent rates for both US and international calls.  Block of time discounts.  Elimination of many taxes and/or fees that anyone who is not AT&T is obligated to collect and pass along.  The savings locked in for a three year term.  All of the numbers seemed to make sense.  And, they would be there to solve problems for me.    

Within days the discussion was reduced to a formal proposal and then a signed contract.  By March 31, 2009, the switch in long distance carriers had been authorized.  TCI was presumably happy.  Kevin’s commission probably grew, so I assume he was happy.  I believed I was about to save some future costs, a matter of deep interest in a down economy, so I was happy.  The only loser, and the only unhappy party after the dust settled, was going to be my prior long distance provider, who had provided exemplary service for years, at a fair price, and was now toast.

I felt bad about for a few minutes, then got over it.    

The next day, the fun began.

CHAPTER THREE

The first dark cloud appeared just about three weeks after I signed up with AT&T.  Somewhere during the week of the 20th of April I received an invoice.  The closing date was April 15th, which meant it reflected two weeks of activity under our “old” relationship, and two weeks under the new agreement. 

As background, let me explain that we often make a lot of phone calls each month….a few thousand in a slow month, over 10,000 when it’s busy.  Consequently, a major concern for me is the cost of each phone call, which is, in turn, driven by two factors.  The first is the per-minute rate, which is pretty self-explanatory, and the second is the incremental billing unit.  We produce a lot of short phone calls – get a machine and hang up – so the latter is fairly important.  My deal with AT&T was for just $.05 per minute, billed in ten-second increments.  Simple.  Right?   

So, my April bill arrived and I was instantly greeted with a list of calls, a couple of pages worth, the detail of which showed they had been billed at $.56 per minute (not $.05) with an incremental billing unit of a full sixty seconds (not ten seconds).  Not quite the deal I had been sold, or agreed to.    

Oddly, the incorrect cost appeared on only two days of the billing period; April 13th and 14th.  There was something decidedly strange about that, in that they had it right for two weeks, and then started getting it wrong.  To this day I’ve not been given a plausible explanation as to what happened, or why, but this much is perfectly clear – someone at AT&T changed something on April 13th, and as a result my costs for a couple of days went up by a factor of more than ten.  Not a bad deal for AT&T, but not the sort of thing that’s likely to go unnoticed.

Well, not by me anyway.  I can’t speak for other people.

Because the damage was limited to only two days of the billing period, it wasn’t life-changing money we were talking about – only $84.00 – but if it continued for weeks, months or years……well, like Everett Dirkson once said, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

So, enter my friends at Total Communications, Inc., aka TCI, out of East Hartford, CT.  You may recall that TCI’s new reason for existing was to be my “liaison”, my “go-to” solution whenever I needed something related to telephone service.  Being that this seemed to fall within that realm, on or about April 23rd I called Kevin the sales guy at TCI.  You remember him, right?  He was last seen mentally fondling a commission check.  While it came a little quicker than I might have imagined, it was already time for Kevin to earn his pay.

After reaching Kevin I began to explain that we seemed to have some billing issues, and as I launched into an explanation of what had happened, I was pleased to learn that he had online access to my bill and could see exactly what I was looking at and talking about.  Kevin was, of course, instantly and appropriately aghast, totally mystified, and eager to spew a tidal wave of mea culpas.  He promised that the matter would be promptly looked into and rectified.

“Someone will be back to you as soon as we have everything figured out and resolved,” he assured me.

While I’m not all that pleased that my very first bill was incorrect, I’m enough of a realist to know that such things happen from time to time.  So, with Kevin in my corner, I put the matter aside and devoted myself to trying to make a few bucks.

CHAPTER FOUR

Somewhere around the first of May I realized that the April phone bill, still awaiting formal notification of how much credit was to be applied, remained an open item.  While the quick and simple approach would have been to just deduct the over-billed amount and submit an adjusted payment, sadly, the economic aspects of the telecommunications industry have become such a morass of government driven economic legerdemain that the words simple and phone bill are no longer allowed to exist in the same sentence.

Yeah, yeah, despite the fact that they just did.

The problem is there are….I don’t know….maybe seventy or eighty lines of taxes, fees, surcharges and other forms of arcane, esoteric, technical sounding who-ha that gets added to my phone bill each month.  Most of it is couched in government-speak; that unique application of language that hides extortionary intent under the cloak of euphemistic misdirection.  One of my monthly line items is a charge for a Federal Regulatory Fee.  I rest my case.  

Sometimes these regulatory money-grabs are tacked on as flat fees; other times as percentages, though in my experience it is nearly impossible to figure out what those percentages are percentages of.  And don’t look for guidance anywhere on the bill.  The formulas are all a secret.  Pickpockets in the New York subways wish they could operate as smoothly.

Sadly, because of that lack of transparency, attempting to calculate or verify my charges appears to require access to several supercomputers, a team of quantum physicists, the proper alignment of the fourth moon of Jupiter, and enough electricity to power Romania for a year.  All I‘ve got at my disposal is a small desk calculator.  Plastic.  Solar powered.

So, I called Kevin again.  You know, Kevin, my go-to guy.  The person who was supposed to have liaised on my behalf as a means of getting me an explanation of what had occurred and what would be done to fix it.  I reached him on the first try, then let a hint of displeasure filter into my voice as I informed him that I was still waiting for a reply.   

“Oh!” he said.  “No one ever got back to you?”   

Ah, the lifeblood of any bureaucracy; pass the buck.  Not the response I was expecting.  Not the one I wanted to hear.

I quickly debated some known and trusted applications of sarcastic understatement to illustrate what a brilliant piece of deduction I found his response to be.  Eventually, I settled on what I call my slow-cooker reply.  Instead of saying anything, I merely grunted.  The sound of disapproval traveled unfettered to East Hartford.  I was certain of it.           

Confirming that he got the message, I was promptly fed deep-dish servings of disbelief and apology.  I think I may have even heard an inference or two that heads would soon be rolling.   All of it was delivered with such a full dose of sycophantic urgency that I drew the unfettered conclusion he would actually follow up on it this time. 

He promised he would be back to me as soon as he could.

Again.

CHAPTER FIVE

I had last spoken to Kevin around May 1.  Eleven days later, on Monday the 11th, I paused and took inventory of the number of times I had communicated with him, or for that matter, anyone else from either TCI or AT&T, in the days since.  Care to take a guess?  Oh, go on.  Give it a try.  

Here’s a hint.  It’s a real, real, real low number.  

Phone calls?  None.

Letters?  Zero.

Emails?  Nope.

Smoke signals?  Carrier pigeons?  Telegrams?  Psychic transmissions? 

Uh-uh!  Nothing on any front.  Not a thing.  

As I pondered that situation for a spell, there seemed to be little question that the relationship I’d thought I was buying into had – so far – fallen a fair distance short of what was promised.  Mind you, these were not earth shaking, end of the world sort of problems I was facing, but the continuing failure to deal with them was definitely beginning to move them up on the annoyance scale.

Notwithstanding the cold reality that getting perfect customer service these days is far more often a matter of surprise than expectation, I’d definitely anticipated a bit more liaising and a whole lot more “go-to”-ing than I’d seen to date.  Hell, if an answer wasn’t available, getting a simple acknowledgement of that……..getting SOMETHING………would have been preferable to the resounding sounds of silence.  

“Oh!  No one ever got back to you?”

No, they did not.

Again.     

I concluded it was time to start getting some of this on paper.  If nothing else, I wanted to impart the message that TCI’s performance to date was not the stuff that long-term partnerships were made of.  I learned a long time ago that the longer you let a problem languish, the harder it becomes to ever deal with it.  Ask General Motors.        

So a letter was composed and faxed to TCI on that same day; the 11th of May.  The letter included a recap of the original problem with the April bill, a regurgitation of the actions that had been promised but not fulfilled, and an editorial comment or two about the underwhelming nature of their performance to date.  I also pointed out that because the invoice in question was approaching the due date, I was being forced to make my own adjustment, and was including a copy of the letter with the payment I was about to send out.  

Confirming that definitive proactivity can sometimes get constipated wheels turning, the very next day I received a phone call from……you guessed it, Kevin.

“I have news,” he informed me straight away.  “Sorry this took so long, but AT&T has agreed to provide you with a credit for the calls that were over-billed on your April invoice.”  

“Really,” I replied.  “Well, it took them long enough, didn’t it?  But, better late than never, I suppose.”

“I agree.  The credit, by the way, is for forty-nine dollars.  $49.05 to be precise.”

“I beg your pardon?”  I verbally raised a hand.  Had I misheard him?  “Did you say forty-nine dollars?”   

“Yep,” he confirmed my hearing.  “Forty-nine dollars.  And five cents.”  

“Right.  And five cents.”  Okay, I was thinking to myself, what’s going on?  Did one of us just step into a Romulan time-warp?  Finally, “Kevin, forgive me if I fail to get all weepy with gratitude here, but maybe you would be kind enough to take a run at explaining to me where the forty-nine dollar figure came from?”

“What do you mean?” he asked cautiously, sounding a little taken aback that I wasn’t jumping for joy over his news.   

“What I mean is, my recollection is that the over-billed amount was $84.00.”

“Uh…..yeah?” Kevin replies with sudden caution.  He seems to finally understand where this is going, but he’s not offering anything.  

“Simple question.  How did we end up with a credit for $49?”

“Ummm….” he mumbles, trying to buy time, his growing discomfort evident even from 45 miles away, “that’s the amount they calculated the overcharges came to,” he finally offered.

“By they you mean AT&T?”

“Right.”

“And did you ask whoever gave you this number how they arrived at it?  Is there a formula of some kind being employed?  Was a dartboard used?  Maybe a ouija board was brought into play?”   

“Actually, I found a message on my voice mail when I came in today.”  I can imagine him squirming on the other end of the line as he adds, “I didn’t personally get a chance to talk to anyone.”

No kidding, I think to myself.

“Are you going to try to change that?” I suggest.

“Sure, no problem.  I’ll see what I can find out and I’ll get back to you as soon as I do.”

It was about the same thing he’d said the last time we spoke.  A few hurried platitudes and then click, he was gone.    

After we’d hung up, I was left to ponder what I’d just heard.

Various thoughts went through my mind. 

Optimism wasn’t one of them.

 CHAPTER SIX

A couple of days passed. 

Then a couple more.

Pretty soon a week was gone.

Then another week.

All in all, ten business days came and went, and during that entire time, I didn’t hear another word from Kevin or anyone associated with him or his company.

By May 22 I was…….let’s see…….how do I put this…..?

…….Damned Freakin’ Unhappy……..?

Yeah, that about covers it.  

Now, that said, and just to keep this in perspective, I’m an adult.  I’ve been walking the face of the planet for a while.  I’ve been around the track a few times.  I’ve got the waistline and gray hairs to prove it.

During my travels, there have been times when I’ve agreed to pay for the provision of a good or service, then found that once the seller had my cash in hand, they pretty quickly ceased to give a hoot about me or my interests.  More often than not the focal point of such transactions have entailed less lofty topics, usually something along the lines of would you like some stewed gator meat on that pizza? or could I interest you in some whipped monkey pulp in your frappuccino?  Things like that.  

Of course in this case there wasn’t any food involved in the transaction.  Still, the level of disinterest being shown by TCI seemed similar in nature to what I’d witnessed in fast food joints from coast to coast.   At a minimum, it seemed to suggest that they had other ways to earn a living; something to fall back on, thereby enabling a lackadaisical approach to this one without fear of starvation setting in.  Maybe something like -     

“Care for some long distance today?  No?  Okay.  How about a vacuum cleaner then?  Hmmmm, what’s that?  What are we doing selling vacuum cleaners?  Well sir, as some have pointed out, our service really sucks, so we figured the best way to build our business was to utilize our strengths.  Had a good Hoover lately?  Want one?”

Well, okay, that was unfounded speculation on my part.  Well, except for the part about the service sucks.  The rest of it I made up.  Sorry.  My bad.

Still, it was hard to not wonder.   

Now, where was I before I digressed?

Oh yes, the point is, like an actor who’s won an obscure award; like a politician who gathered a vote without paying for it; or like a Boston Red Sox fan of any description, the thrill of victory gives some people a sense of entitlement.  It tends to produce visions of inflated self-importance, which in turn plants and nurtures a seed that one day grows into the full-fledged belief that they can look out on the world at large and haughtily proclaim –

DILLIGAF?    

The question was, is that what was happening here?  I mean I’d first asked my liaison guy to liaise a month earlier.  Three times in a row he had promised  he would, and three times in a row he had left me twisting in the wind.  Was there a correlation here?  Was this indisputable evidence that I was simply being flipped off?  Was it just my imagination or were the words, “I’ll get back to you,“ starting to take on the timbre of a B Movie, increasingly sounding like something more along the lines of “Die Sucka, Die!”?

I was still debating that point when some new mail landed on my desk.  I sifted the pile.  Two envelopes immediately crashed into my awareness.

One was an invoice from AT&T.  The other was an invoice from my old long distance provider; the one on whom I had pulled the plug some six or seven weeks earlier. 

I opened them, reviewed the contents, and groaned.

My first thought was, the hits just keep on coming.

My second thought was, what the hell did I let these people get me into?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Because a long holiday weekend had been approaching when I opened the invoices, I let them sit for a few days.  Memorial Day had been fast approaching, and I figured that like many pillagers of the countryside, folks at TCI were probably going to be distracted by visions of sailing on their yachts, taking their Lear’s to the Costa Del Sol, and other rituals attendant to ditching the proletariat for the unofficial first weekend of summer.  Who knows, maybe they were in the market for a good Hoovering as well.  I really wasn’t intimately familiar with how these people spent their leisure time.

And in fairness, part of the delay was my own desire for peace on earth and goodwill toward men, which I figured a pre-holiday discussion with one or more micro cephalic yahoos may not serve to promote.  I suspected the latter would be particularly true if I were to actually use a phrase like micro cephalic yahoo, which  I saw as the sort of thing that might, just might, accidentally slip out.     

So I waited, and finally on Tuesday, May 26th I faxed a letter to Kevin, my “go-to” guy at Total Communications, Inc., aka TCI, of East Hartford, CT.   It was a letter of medium duration.  Because the details are not likely to be anything you’d find all that interesting, allow me to merely touch on the high points.

1)  Remember the $84.00 in overcharges, then the $49.05 credit?  Well, the credit had actually appeared on my new invoice.  Hurray!!!   But, the uncredited portion – which had still not been dealt with, or explained – was now showing as Past Due.  Various thoughts went through my mind over this turn of events.  I confess they were not all of the pleasant variety.          

 2)  When my account was switched over to AT&T, someone had missed bringing over my toll-free number.  Consequently, I had received a bill for continuing services from my old long distance carrier; a bill on which minimum usage charges had kicked in, as well as the myriad  taxes, access fees, and other regulatory gobbledy-gook, the avoidance of which were among the reasons I’d switched to AT&T in the first place.  I’d been of the impression that my old account was closed.  To find that I was instead running a meter with two phone companies for the same service was the sort of revelation that did not exactly make me all warm and fuzzy about my most recent choice in telecommunications providers.

3)  Next, falling firmly into the realm of what, in hindsight, I would categorize as a mountain of bovine…..stuff….., and I mean, we’re talking a mountain here of truly spectacular dimensions, someone found a way to take my international calls, which were supposed to be billed for about a nickel a minute, and run them through the system at rates that ranged from $1.16 per minute for calls to Canada, up to as much as $3.70 a minute for calls to Mexico.  Courtesy of those rates, a couple hundred dollars was added to the bill.  

4)  And finally, I discussed the block of time package I’d bought into.  Long story short, they had processed the wrong sized block.  As I pointed out in my letter, it was not a major economic issue at the moment, but it did “stand as further evidence that you folks are having trouble getting much of anything right”. 

So, after a written discussion of those matters, I finally observed that the move I‘d made for cost-saving purposes had, so far, in barely over a month, left me hosed for something right in the neighborhood of $300.00.  I further opined that it was all beginning to look like the result of the “combined effects of incompetence, misrepresentation and, quite possibly, outright fraud.”  I then added language to the effect that I was somewhat unhappy.  Didn’t want to leave any room for doubt on that point.   

Oh, and I gave them a deadline to fix it all.  It was a short deadline, a couple of days, after which I promised that either our problems were going to be behind us, or we were going to “go back to the relationship we had before I allowed myself to be talked into doing business with you.”

I had no idea what they were going to do, though recent history suggested no worse than 50-50 odds that they would ignore it.  I sat back and waited.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Early in the morning on May 27, the phone rang.  It was Kevin.  My “go-to” guy.  It dawned on me that his presence at the other end of the line might have been nascent evidence that the road to catching this boy’s attention was to send nasty letters to his office.

Or maybe smack him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

Well, I confess I had not had the opportunity to try that one out, but it was an idea whose time, it seemed, might be close at hand. 

Anyway, Kevin was on the phone, which itself was on speaker, and in the room with him was a gent whose name I failed to catch, but who claimed to be Kevin’s boss.  Guess they decided it was time to bring in the cavalry.  I wondered if the nameless boss had his own supply of rolled up newspapers.

After some major sucking up, mainly from the boss, who was clearly the alpha male on this mountainside, we ran down the list du jour of open issues.     

1) I’ve mentioned in earlier installments that part of the deal from AT&T entailed “block of time” billing.  For the uninitiated, block of time is rather similar in function to a prepaid cell phone.  For a discounted but set monthly figure, I receive a fixed number of minutes to use in any way and at any time I desire.  My calls are charged against that block of time until it has been exhausted, at which point conventional per-minute billing kicks in.

Well, it turns out that AT&T had failed to set up, and hence had failed to charge me for, any block of time cost on the April bill.  When I raised my question about credit for $84.00 worth of inflated charges, they actually did issue the credit – eventually – but then, without explanation, added back in a new charge for $39.00 – which was for the block of time cost they had failed to bill.  So, take the credit, subtract the charge, and the difference is………drum roll maestro……a credit for $49…..and five cents.

The root issue here?  One billing mistake had been identified.  There was actually two.      

“Okay, that makes perfect sense,” I conceded once I’d heard it all.  “The numbers add up.  But wouldn’t it have been a hell of lot easier to offer that explanation at the outset instead leaving all of us wondering for weeks where the figure came from?”

A bit of mumbled agreement in return.

I looked around to see if I had a newspaper handy. 

All I see is a phone book. 

It’s a thought.     

2) Sticking with the block of time theme, there is still one teensy, tiny little problem, I tell them.  I bought a monthly block of pre-determined size and cost.  I’ve been charged for a different plan. 

The essence of the reply, and on this point I think it’s important to be sure I quote this correctly, was, “Ooops!”.

Or words to that effect. 

Ah, but this one is an AT&T screw-up, the boss eagerly informs me.  The order was correctly placed by TCI.  It was AT&T that somehow got it wrong.  He assures me it will be fixed right away.

Bad AT&T.  Bad doggy. 

Gotta get me some newspapers.

3) The excess international long-distance charges on the most recent bill are also being credited back, they proudly informed me.  In fact. AT&T has promised to apply the credit immediately, so there is not even any need to wait for it to appear.  They give me a figure and tell me to just go ahead and deduct it from my next payment.  And by the way, that one is another AT&T screw-up. 

Doggy is bad.  Bad AT&T.  Bad, bad, bad. 

I eyeball the phonebook.  AT&T is a big dog.  I may need a bigger book.     

4) On the failure to transfer my toll-free number, we briefly revert back to the “Ooops!” defense, after which Kevin gets unceremoniously thrown under the bus.  An oversight on his part, the boss claims.  Kevin was supposed to get an authorization form signed, but never did.  That was faxed to me a short time later, signed and faxed back.

Bad Kevin.  No chew-strip for you tonight.  

With fault and blame thus established and distributed, I informed them that the oversight on my toll-free number had left me with an active PNG account on which eighty-six cents worth of calls, after being subjected to a litany of minimum usage fees and taxes and add-ons, had produced a $58.00 bill; this on an account that should have been closed.  I thought about demanding a refund, but given that that they hadn’t even exhibited the ability to properly charge for their own services, it seemed unlikely they possessed the advanced skill set required to deal with third party billing issues.  So I decided we’d stick to newspapers and parlor tricks for now, but I also made it clear that I’d better not get another bill from PNG like the last one.

The conclusion of the discussion was that everything had either been fixed already, or would be imminently.  “We value your business,” they assured me.  “We’re sorry things got off on the wrong foot, but everything should be fixed now and on-track now.  Hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here.”

I pondered that for a second.  By my read, their interest in cleaning up the issues seemed genuine enough, and if it was true that all of the solutions had already been put in place, then the worst should be over.  I decided they’d spent enough time on the gangplank.

“Okay,” I told them, “I’ll take everything you’re saying at face value.  But let there be no mistake – you’re on probation.  This is your last chance to get it right.  One more screw up, and I mean anything at all, and our relationship is over.”

And that, my friends, should be the end of the story, right?

Ah, if only that were true.

Sometimes bad doggies just refuse to learn.

CHAPTER NINE

My expectations for any phone company are minimal.  All they need to do is make sure there’s a dial tone when I pick up a handset, make sure my call goes through, and then at the end of the month, send me an accurate bill for services rendered.  If I ask anything else, it is only that they be invisible, and do nothing to irritate me.

For over three weeks, AT&T properly filled that role.  Then on June 23, my monthly bill arrived.

It took exactly 4.7 seconds from the moment the envelope was opened for the parts about sending me an accurate bill and doing nothing to irritate me to implode.  Images of rolled up newspapers came instantly to mind.  Again.   They were just as quickly discarded as being woefully inadequate to the situation at hand.  I began to consider more substantial options.  Something with the name Louisville Slugger on it, for example.  Maybe Lockheed-Martin.

I wondered if what I was looking at could possibly be a joke.  Since I did not hear myself laughing, I decided it was not.  Here’s what I did discover, however.    

1) Remember the credit they promised for past overcharges on international long distance?  Didn’t happen.  Remember how they had told me to just go ahead and deduct the amount of the overcharges?  That amount was now shown as Past Due – Please Pay Immediately.

2) Remember how the long distance overcharges had been generated on calls to Canada and Mexico?  They did it again…….which is to say that the pile of accumulated overcharges not only failed to go away, it actually got bigger.

3) And then there was my personal favorite in the continuing saga of the Bad Doggy School of Business Management.  I have two business offices in the UK.  Not too surprisingly, I have interoffice phone conversations from time to time.  In reviewing the cost detail of the current bill, one such conversation rather jumped out at me.  It was for a 35-minute chat that, a not uncommon sort of occurrence.  At $.05 per minute, should have generated a charge of roughly $1.75.

You ready for this? 

 The actual charge was $147.70.  

Instead of billing the call at $.05 per minute, the number actually used was $4.22 per minute.  I was never a math major, but I’m pretty sure that comes out to just about 85 times what it should have cost.  That’s one phone call, folks.   

Now, lest I be accused of one-sided reporting, they did manage to get one thing right.  My toll-free number was finally brought over and added to my call plan.  Putting aside that it took them two and half months to get that sorted out, they did eventually get it right.  Unfortunately, it was the only thing they got right.       

Was it even possible, I kept asking myself, that AT&T and TCI, combined, could really be this utterly incompetent?  If not, what was the alternate explanation?  Was someone, somewhere, just having fun at my expense, yanking my chain as a way to satiate a really perverse sense of humor?  After all, given the number of screw-ups, the repetitive nature of those screw-ups, and the complete and utter failure to fix those screw-ups, how can this degree of ineptitude be seen, be explained, as anything other than deliberate?

But why?  Or more precisely, why me?  AT&T must have somewhere around a gazillion customers, and from the ranks of those massive hordes, surely there must be someone more deserving than me of being culled out for abuse.  I mean, I never bucked gazillion to one odds and won the lottery, so what are the chances of my having drawn the losing ticket in an AT&T customer dissatisfaction initiative?

But if not, I return to the initial argument, which is, how could a company of any size, but particularly a multi-billion dollar behemoth like this one, be so incomprehensibly clueless, so stupendously disorganized, so monumentally bungling without the presence of at least some degree of intent?    

My conclusion?  The question was unanswerable…….but, one thing was nonetheless certain.  I’d had more than enough of AT&T.  It took me a few days, but on July 6, I drafted and then faxed a new letter to Kevin.  The essence of the letter was pretty simple.  Should a cliff-note version ever be developed, it will read something like – Dear Kevin, you and AT&T are fired.

———————————————————————————

After that letter was sent, I made a call to my previous long distance provider and basically begged them to take me back.  It turns out that AT&T, by having failed to switch my toll-free number, and by thus having left my PNG account active, had actually done me a favor.  Everything was still in place.  The only thing that needed to be done was to change the PIC codes.  PIC stands for Presubscribed Interexchange Carrier.   There are over 2,000 long distance carriers, each of which are assigned a number that, when used, directs traffic and invoices to the proper destinations.  In our case, we needed to have everything switched to PIC Code 0555.

The only bad news?  PIC Codes are controlled and can only be changed by…..yep, AT&T.  Tell me that’s not the fox guarding the henhouse.             

So I called AT&T.  After getting bounced around to three different people, I finally found someone who admitted having the ability to change my long distance carrier.  I placed an order to do just that, giving the AT&T rep the PIC Codes I needed programmed.  I was given a confirmation number and told it would take a couple days to make the change.   The entire transaction took less than 40 minutes, which anyone who’s ever dealt with AT&T knows is like a heartbeat in the fabric of time. 

Meanwhile, the June 15 invoice was still sitting here in need of attention.  While placing the order to change the PIC Codes, I asked if I was speaking to someone who could provide help with billing issues as well.  Of course having one-stop shopping would be too easy, wouldn’t it?  From AT&T’s point of view, it’s apparently advantageous to have things compartmentalized, decentralized, fragmented, sufficiently scattered to make it as difficult as possible to conduct any business that falls outside the scope of ordering a new service.  Thus the answer was no, sorry, we don’t deal with billing issues here.   You’ll have to talk to our billing department for that.  Their number is……

Having already spent way too much stuck on the phone just to get to this point, I decided it would be a much more productive use of my time to just send them a letter.  So, I itemized a list of deductions from both the previous and current month’s invoices, wrote a check for the reduced total, which was about half of the invoice amount, and enclosed a letter detailing our parting of the ways and the reasons therefor.

Sayonara.  Arrivederci.  Auf Wiedersehen.  Ciao.  Bounjour et Bonsoir.  Beat it.  Scram.  Hit the road, Jack.

———————————————————————————

On July 10, I received written confirmation from PNG that they had received my order for service on four lines.  Because I’ve got seven lines, not four, I promptly called them to find out what happened to the other three.  Notwithstanding the letter, PNG confirmed that their records showed all seven lines were active, as they should be. 

A few days later I received a letter from AT&T, dated July 11, which had been sent to “confirm your recent change in service.……..” and to inform me of a pending charge for “Adding or Changing your Intrastate Long Distance Carrier” and for “Adding or Changing your Interstate Long Distance Carrier.”  Sure.  Why not?  It took someone a nanosecond to flip a switch somewhere.  Stands to reason I’d get a bill for it.    

But it was worth it.  My dealings with AT&T were on the brink of being over, and if it cost a few bucks to get rid of them, I was more than willing to pay.  Good riddance.        

Or so I thought.

CHAPTER TEN

A couple of weeks went by.  Around the third week of July, two invoices landed on my desk.

The first is from PNG, who has once again been handling my long distance again for the past couple of weeks.  The bill struck me as a bit small at the time, but I checked my account status on their web site, noted that everything looked the way it should, and failed to give it a second thought.      

A day or two later a second bill showed up, this one from AT&T.  Hoping for the best but half expecting the worst, I took a deep breath, opened the envelope and, lo and behold, inside I found an invoice that was actually correct!  Hundreds of dollars in credits had been posted to cover all of the over-billings of the past.  All of the rates charged for the current billing month were correct.  I couldn’t believe it, but there it was.  Finally, at long last, now that I’d gotten rid of them, they had managed to get it right.  

A day late and a dollar short, but that was their problem.  I’ll give credit where it’s due.  I finally got an accurate invoice.

Of course, I was still out a few bucks, because if any of this had been handled correctly from the start, I’d have only been getting bills for the past few months – including this month – from one phone company, instead of two.  However, given the positive events of the day, it struck me as foolishly playing with fire to try to get any of the resultant double-billing eliminated.  Let it go, I told myself.  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.  Let that sleeping dog lie. 

Walk away, chalk it up as a cost of doing business; the cost of a painful but useful lesson learned, and don’t look back.  

Which is exactly what I did.

It was only much later that I began to wonder why I had never noticed or questioned the call dates that were reflected on both bills.

——————————————————————-

Another month went by, late August arrived, and the newest monthly invoice from PNG showed up.  I knew this was going to be the first bill since their reinstatement to reflect a full month’s activity.  As I opened it, I recalled the small bill they had sent the month before.  I fully expected that this one, reflecting a full month’s worth of call activities, was going to be notably larger.

But it wasn’t.

Instead, the new invoice was the same size as the previous month’s bill, and the month before that, and the month before that, and…….. well, you get the idea.  I could not quantify or verify anything, but a bad feeling came over me.  Like Yogi said, it was déjà vu all over again.     

I went to the PNG website, logged into my account page and checked my current status of services.  There I was greeted with the news that only four of my seven phone numbers (one of the four being my main line) were showing as being active with PNG.  My toll-free number also showed as active.  My other three numbers were listed as inactive.  Altogether, the total number of calls for which I had just been billed, and this is for a full month, was four. 

Not four hundred. 

Not four thousand. 

Four.         

Questions arise.  Things like how?  When?  Why?  

By whom?

Lots of questions.  No answers.  

One thing is certain; I was unhappy.  Real unhappy.  I wasn’t sure who I was unhappy with, at least not with verifiable certainty, but let there by no doubt that I had a suspect in mind.  PNG was my designated long distance carrier.  A few thousand calls made during the most recent billing period seemed to have gone astray.  Was it possible?

A few days later an envelope with an all too familiar logo on it arrived at my office.  I quickly opened it, then groaned as what I saw staring at me confirmed my worst fears were coming to pass.  AT&T was supposed to be providing me with local phone and DSL service only.  Their bill should have been a little over $300.  It was instead about seven times that amount.

I read, and a few things were revealed.  

First, all of the long distance calls itemized by AT&T have been produced by, or at least charged to, just two phone numbers.  

Second, one of those two numbers shows as being active on PNG’s web site.  I still haven’t figured out how that could be, or what it meant.  Then again, I was done with AT&T and now they were somehow back and I haven’t figured out how that could be either.    

Third, we have a new line item I’ve never seen before.  It’s called “Contract Commitment Charge”, and on that line is a charge for $1,485.00.  There is no reason, no explanation, no detail of any kind to indicate what the charge is for, though I can take what will probably be a pretty accurate guess.  AT&T will no doubt call it something akin to an early cancellation fee.  I’d be more inclined to call it extortion.

In either event, there is nothing to indicate the basis on which this charge has been calculated, and for the second time in recent months, familiar questions arise.  Is there a formula of some kind being employed?  Is there a corporate dartboard being used?  Has a ouija board was brought into play?

But even those questions are overshadowed by the bigger underlying mystery.

AT&T was fired roughly seven weeks earlier.  All of the PIC Codes were changed, which took them out of the long distance loop.

And now they were back.

A hijacking? 

Could they do that?

It was a rhetorical question. 

They obviously had.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I spent more than a week pondering options.  Well, on second thought, let me rephrase that.  I spent more than a week trying to identify an option.

This was absolutely new ground for me.  If I don’t like the car I’m driving, I just get rid of it and pick up a new one.  If my grocer or favorite restaurant or local service station or any one of hundreds of other stores or services fails to serve me well, I have the unrestricted option to take my money somewhere else.  To the best of my knowledge, the only service I can’t get rid of if they do a lousy job is the US Postal Service.  

But now it appeared that AT&T was trying to join the same rarified realm.  They did not want to go quietly into that good night, and since they seemed to control all the systems and computers that propel everything, I was having a hard time figuring out what I could do about it.  I mean it’s not like I could walk into their office and reprogram their computer myself.  Aside from having no idea where the computer is, I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it even if I could locate it.

Besides, I assume that AT&T probably has an internal security force that would rival the size of most standing armies in the world.  Given how they apparently treat customers, I could just imagine what they’d do to an intruder.          

I spent time conducting online research, trying to find regulatory or statutory passages or provisions that might offer remedies should a de facto public utility try to force its services on someone, which was more or less what was happening here.  While my research was not exhaustive – I do have a business to try to run – I came away with little to show for my efforts.

I had to do something, and I needed a place to start, so on or around September 8, I called PNG.  I got right through to customer service, explained that AT&T was billing me for services that PNG was supposed to be providing, and asked them to check their computers to see what they had to say.  They replied that they showed all seven lines, and my toll-free line, were being serviced by them.  I then asked them if they had any thoughts on how call charges on some of those lines were being generated by AT&T, not them.  The person I spoke with hemmed and hawed and stammered a bit, before finally saying that whatever was going on, it had to be something that AT&T had done or was doing.

They asked if I knew with certainty whether the PIC codes were set to 0555.  I replied that the order to do so had definitely been placed, and that a confirmation of the change had been received, but there was no way for me to personally verify if they had really done it; or if they had recently changed them back…..as current evidence seemed to suggest.  Because that was a limitation that PNG faced as well, we agreed that I had little choice but to get a hold of AT&T.   

According to my most recent bill, the number to call for customer service was 1-800-448-1008.  During the afternoon of September 10, 2009, I dialed that number.  Let me recite for you how that effort went, and I make that offer with the caveat that I am not making up or embellishing any of what you are about to read.

2:52 pm – I called the number on my phone bill, and was connected to an automated system that utilizes voice recognition technology.  For a couple of minutes a saccharine and nauseatingly obsequious mechanical voice tormented me with questions.  In attempting to converse with this machine about the reason for my call, I discover that it’s limited vocabulary does not includes phrases such as “up yours” or “your company is screwed up”.  Eventually it either got the information it required, or it gave up, I’m not sure which, because it finally asked me to please wait while my call was forwarded to the “appropriate department”.   

On an unrelated side note, it is my fervent hope that the person who invented voice recognition answering systems is one day kidnapped by and made the communal love toy of a nomadic band of rabid marsupials.  Whoever you are, I hate you.  I’m pretty sure mankind hates you.    

2:55 pm – The call is forwarded.  I hear it ring on the other end.  Another machine picks up.  I am placed in the hold queue at what is announced as the “residential service center”.  

3:02 pm – A live person answers the phone and after a brief exchange informs me that I have called the wrong department.  This is residential services, I am informed, not business services.  I am told I need to call 800-448-1008.  I respond that that is the number I called.  I think I hear the sound of a shrug at the other end as the person tells me that all they can tell me is to try again.  DILLIGAF?  Click.  

3:03 – Once again I called the number on my phone bill, and was connected to an automated system that utilizes voice recognition technology.  For a couple of minutes the same saccharine and nauseatingly obsequious mechanical voice tormented me with questions.  In an effort to improve my odds of success, and fearful that my unexpected responses may have confused this technological savant, I avoided using phrases such as “up yours” and “your company is screwed up”.  Instead I respond to all inquiries in my most pleasant, patronizing and mechanical type voice, hoping the machine will see and treat me as a kindred spirit.  Once again I was asked to please wait while my call was forwarded to the “appropriate department”.

3:06 pm – The call is forwarded.  I hear it ring on the other end.  Another machine picks up.  I am placed in the hold queue at what is announced as the “residential service center”.  I hang my head.  I moan to myself.  As CCR once sang, “there’s a bad moon on the rise”.        

3:15 pm – A live person answers the phone and after a brief exchange informs me that I have called the wrong department.  This is residential services, I am told, not business services.  Better yet, this time it is residential services for California customers only.  I am told I need to call 800-448-1008.  I respond that that is the number I called.  Twice.  I suggested there may be something wrong with their phone lines, but stifle the desire to suggest they call the phone company for help, just to see how that works out.  The person on the other end, perhaps sensing my frustration, tells me she should be able to help transfer me to the right place.  She asks me to sit on hold and warns me it may be for a minute or two.  I thank her profusely, barely able to contain my gratitude.  

3:20 pm.  – A few minutes go by.  I’d begun to wonder if I’d been forgotten.  Then my savior lady in California came back on the line, informed me that she has found the right place to send me, and was about to put my call through.  I thanked her again, then listened in as a number was dialed and –

Yes! 

Hurray!

It is answered on the other end…..

…..and is then almost immediately disconnected. 

I groaned.  My savior in California groaned.  She tried to put the call through again, then tells me that something has changed and she is and will be unable to try to transfer me as intended.  She apologized, then essentially told me that there was nothing more that could be done on her end.  I needed to dial the original number again and hope things go better.

3:22 pm – Once again I call the same number; the one that was on my phone bill.  I was once again connected to an automated system that utilizes voice recognition technology.  For a couple of minutes the same saccharine and nauseatingly obsequious mechanical voice tormented me with questions.  I would kill this machine if I could.  But I cannot.  I am at its mercy.  So I answered its infernal questions, but all the time I was wishing I could direct a lightening strike in its direction – one that would fry every circuit it has.   Finally, I hear those familiar words, the ones that ask me to please wait while my call is forwarded to the “appropriate department”.

3:23 pm – The call is forwarded.  I hear it ring on the other end.  Another machine picks up.  I am placed in the hold queue at what is announced as the “residential service center”. 

My mother didn’t raise a complete fool. 

I see where this is going. 

I hang up.  

3:24 pm – I called.  Again.  The same friggin’ number.  The one on my phone bill.  I get the same irritating voice recognition system.  A lightening strike is no longer satisfactory, I decide.  I’m now thinking earthquake, maybe a comet, definitely something that will leave total destruction in its wake.  I answer the questions for the umpteenth time.  Once again the machine asks me to please wait while my call is forwarded to the “appropriate department”.  “I hate you”, I said to the departing voice.  “May all your progeny be afflicted with viruses and encrusted in rust.”

3:25 pm - The call is forwarded.  It rings.  Another machine picks up.  It is the “residential service center”.  Again.  A comet is too good for them, I decide.   There needs to be some pain and suffering involved.  I picture a tanker of Coca-Cola being poured over its neural networks, slowly, smoke rising from its chips.    If there is disease and pestilence that can imperil machinery, I commit myself to conjuring it.          

I hang up.  Again

3:26 pm – I called again, unable to stop myself in the face of the immutable challenge.  I’ve begun documenting everything that is going on because I know it is more than I’ll be able to reconstruct in the future.  Besides, who would believe it unless I have a record?  The way this is going, there could be a book in the making.  I’m not sure if it will be a comedy or a tragedy.  I’m wondering how close I may be to a Guinness World Record.  I suspect I have a ways to go.

The phone rings and rings.  I prepare myself for the mechanical voice I have come to hate.

And then a miracle occurred. 

Someone picked up. 

A real person, not a machine.  It is a female.  I’d have been happy with a golden retriever at that point, but a female was even better.

And then a second miracle occurred.  It’s not residential services, this time.  I have actually, finally, reached the business services department.

I was ready to kiss my telephone, a far cry from the sign language I’d been flipping it for much of the afternoon.

I quickly explained the nature of my call, added in my travails of that afternoon, and begged her to not let me get disconnected.  She promised me she would not let that happen.  In response to her request I provided my name and number.  I can hear her typing on the other end.  A second goes by, then she says, “Ooops.  This is an agent account.” 

Ooops is not a word I’m thrilled to be hearing right now.

“Agent account,” I repeat.  “What does that mean?”

“You are serviced by a company called Total Communications, Inc.?” she asks.

I roll my eyes, morosely admit she is correct, then ask if I may explain why I’d just as soon keep them out of this.  She agrees to listen and for the next few minutes I explain what has transpired since roughly the first of April.  I talk about liaisons who did not liaise.  Go-to guys that were not.  I hear typing at the other end, but she is otherwise silent as I tell my tale of broken promises, failed agreements and disappointing results.  I’m not sure if her silence indicates commiseration or judgment, but I proceed as if I’ve got a papal blessing.  Finally I explain that I have two purposes in calling.  One, I need to check on and possibly adjust my current PIC Codes.  Two, I have a charge on my current bill for $1,485.00 that I need explained, and more importantly, removed.

PIC codes are easy, she says.  She tells me to send her a fax or email providing the details of what lines are involved and what the PIC code is supposed to be on each.  An email with that information was sent at 4:48pm that same day.

However, she can’t help me with the billing, she apologizes.  That activity is handled by their billing group in Cleveland, and “all I can do is send in a request for information, then get back to you with the response.”  She then utters those words I’d heard too many times from Kevin of Total Communications, Inc., aka TCI, out of East Hartford, CT. 

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” 

She told me her name was Wanda Devereaux.  I guess at the spelling of her last name.  She gave me all of her contact information and I thanked her for any help she could provide.  The call ended at 3:51 pm.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wanda called me first thing the next morning.  The date was September 11th.  With little preamble, she asked me when the service order to switch me away from AT&T had been placed.

It took me a second to flip through notes and find the date.  “On or around July 6,” I finally replied, curious as to why she was asking.

“And the order was to switch your lines to what carrier?”

Some quick background here.  One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that just because you do business with a particular phone company, it does not mean that you are exclusively doing business with that particular phone company.  The way the system seems to work is that I sign up with PNG, then they go out and buy or lease or somehow gain access to time on someone else’s network (like Verizon or Worldcom or MCI) and then resell that time to me, presumably at a profit.  When phone lines are assigned to a PIC code, the computers that drive all this stuff are told whose lines are being used (like Verizon), and who to charge that usage to (like PNG).  The use of names seems to be incidental.  Everything is driven by the programming of PIC Codes.               

“It may have been MCI,” I replied, “but I’m not really sure.  All I know with certainty is that the proper PIC Code is supposed to be 0555.”

“Well, according to the records I can access,“ she says, “I don’t see where you were ever shifted to MCI, or anyone else, but your service from AT&T was dropped on August 16th.”

“Meaning……what?  All of the phones are and have been working, so when you say service was “dropped”, what do you mean?”

Whereupon she explained to me that since August 16th, none of our lines have any longer been part of an AT&T calling plan.  After my old plan – which provided a packaged rate structure – was discontinued, “all of your local call activity has defaulted to AT&T, and all of your long distance has converted to default”.

That’s a quote folks.  I’m not making it up.

I asked if she could put that explanation into English.

“What it means,” she said, “is that as of August 16th, your long distance carrier has been unassigned.  That means that whenever you made a call, the charge rolled to any available carrier.”

Two heartbeats later my eyes were nearly bugging out of my head and my blood pressure had me on the threshold of a stroke.  I was close to saying something I’d probably still be regretting when she said, “No.  Wait.  That’s wrong.”  There was a long silence.  I waited.  Then, “Actually, it looks like your long distance activity defaulted back to AT&T as well.”       

My pulse rate dropped ever so slightly.

“Which means?” I asked.

“Well, it’s hard to say,” she replied.  “The plan you were part of gave you special rates.  Under the default pricing, you would be charged standard rates.”

“What default pricing?” I replied, “Pretty clearly someone at AT&T got my cancellation order.  Now you’re telling me what?  That it took them almost six weeks to do something with it, and when they finally got around to actually throwing the switches or whatever it is you folks do, they failed to program in the PIC codes they were supposed to?  Is that reasonably accurate?”

“Um……maybe.”

“And this would be despite the fact that back in July, I received confirmation that my order had been received and processed.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Uh-huh.  So right now, we’re not sure what rates I’m being charged.  Is that also accurate?”

“Well, um………”            

I was getting a headache.

“I can see it now, my next phone bill is going to be for $40,000.”

She hurriedly but unconvincingly replied that such a thing shouldn’t happen.  No kidding.  In the meantime, she promised to continue working on uncovering what is going on.  “Sit tight”, she said, “and I’ll get back to you.” 

And there they were, those words again.

“I’ll get back to you.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A full week went by during which I never heard a word from Wanda.  Similarly, I never heard from anyone purporting to be a subordinate, a substitute, a peer, a superior, an associate, a friend, neighbor, relative, assignee, assignor, successor, impersonator, replacement, parole officer, bartender, hairstylist or former classmate of Wanda.  It’s like Wanda failed to even exist, as if she disappeared from the face of the Earth, a talent that was beginning to look like a required skill set for anyone even remotely associated with AT&T.  Jimmy cracked corn and I don’t care.  Though I was disappointed, I was not even a little surprised.   

Meanwhile, a couple thousand dollar invoice had been sitting on my desk, unpaid, for a few weeks, the amount in dispute, the questions surrounding it unanswered and unresolved.  The primary issue, of course, was the “Contract Commitment Charge” of nearly fifteen hundred bucks.  The due date of the invoice was September 14, 2009.  It was now the 18th of September.  Even though I remained stuck waiting for answers from AT&T, I saw new complications popping up on the horizon if the entire balance remained ignored. 

Given that the amount charged for the billing period ended July 15 had not been in dispute, I compared the current invoice to the previous month.  By my estimate, call activity for the two months should have been about the same.  Even though there should have been no long distance charges of any kind on the current invoice, I decided to recognize and pay them anyway.  After all, this bill was in place of what PNG would have otherwise sent me, not in addition to.  I figured I owed it to someone.  So, on the 18th I wrote a check for the amount of the July invoice, made it payable to AT&T, changed the amount on the payment slip, and dropped it all into the mail.     

——————————————————–

Another week passed and I still heard from………well, you know the story.  I heard from no one. 

On September 24, a new monthly AT&T bill arrived, this one for the period ending September 15, 2009.  What I was about to open, of course, would reflect whatever had occurred after service from AT&T was “dropped” on August 16th. 

To my everlasting relief, the invoice was not for $40,000 as I had feared.  It was, however, for an amount that was just north of $5,000.  

Not too surprisingly, the previous month’s balance was listed as unpaid and overdue.  That issue had already been addressed, so it wasn’t something I was going to lose any sleep over.  However, after backing that out, new charges for the current month totaled just shy of three thousand dollars. 

As a point of comparison, if I had kept AT&T as my long distance provider, a reasonable total for the invoice would have been around $450.00.  If they had processed my change orders as instructed, it would have been a little over $300.00.  It was, instead, nearly ten times that amount.  The term license to steal came to mind.     

How did they do it?  A quick scan of the details revealed that on the 16th of August, my billing plan of $.05 per minute with ten-second billing increments had been jacked up to $.67 per minute with full-minute billing.  Spread over the course of 27 pages worth of itemized history, detailing over 2,500 individual calls, well, let’s just say it had a measurable impact on the total invoice amount.  

I knew I needed to come up with a game plan to combat this, but I really had no idea where to turn, what to try to do next.  How do you fight a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that apparently has both the inclination and ability to do whatever they want, to whomever they want to do it?  

I had tried to discontinue my relationship with them.  I knew it, they knew it, they knew I knew they knew it, yet they were basically telling me to kiss off, and then daring me to try to do something about it.  By available evidence, they seemed to think that since they owned and controlled all of the systems that drive telecommunications, they had not only the ability, but the right, to do whatever they wanted with it.  In a very bad turn of events for me, their tactics were now becoming downright Stalin-esque.  

At least that’s what I thought at the time.  Little did I know there was more to come.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Two business days later, on the morning of September 28th, I was informed that four of our seven phone lines seemed to be down.  Sure, I thought.  Why not?   

Lines 1 and 2, I discover, when used, led to a recording that said, “Your call cannot be completed because your toll service has been blocked”.  Lines 3 and 5, when used, led to a recording that said, “the number you have reached is not in service”.  The latter is particularly perplexing in that to test the severity of the impediment, I called the business next door, the local post office, even my own house, and despite dialing numbers that were unquestionably in service, we got the same recording every time. 

Lines 4, 6 and 7, for reasons unknown, seemed to be working okay.  Thus four out of seven had been effectively shut down.   

During a recent conversation with one of the phone companies, I had been told that there is a phone number than can be dialed from any phone line which will produce a recording that announces who the long distance carrier is for that line.  On this day I dialed that number (1-700-555-4141) seven times.  When I did, on six of those lines, including the four that did not work, I got a recording saying that MCI was my long distance carrier.  On the seventh line, a recording told me that the carrier was NOS Communications. 

I recalled a discussion with Wanda Devereaux held back on September 11th.  I recalled the name MCI having come up.  I also recalled the unequivocal guidance that maybe I was trying to get hooked up to MCI, maybe not……but that I wanted my lines set to PIC Code 0555.     

A series of rhetorical questions swarmed through my mind.  There was no way to know what exactly was going on, but I found myself unable to ignore the notion that Wanda “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” Devereaux may have had something to do with it.  And, if she did, I not only wanted to know why and how, but I wanted to know how the hell NOS Communications got into this story.

Folks, most of the time I’m a reasonably calm individual.  I try to take things in stride, to not dwell on things I can’t control, to not get too hung up on the little stuff.  For the most part, I succeed. 

But on this day, that wasn’t the case.  I was angry.  Real angry.   

I decided to take the same approach I’d taken the last time I needed information.  I called PNG first. 

That was when I discovered that I could not make a long distance call on any line. 

As I said, four lines led to dead end recordings.   While the other three went through, they did so with so much noise and static that they were effectively dead as well.  I actually got through to PNG twice, but on both occasions, the person at the other end of the line could not hear me.  I eventually used my cell phone to make the call. 

Late on that morning of September 28th, I finally got a call to PNG to go through. 

A woman named Amy Mounce took the call.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I had never heard of or spoken to Amy before, but once I reached her, I explained situation in adequate detail for her to understand that there was an ongoing saga at work here, and that for unknown reasons it had gone critical today.  I told her that mission number one for me today was to determine who currently had my long distance.  Mission number two was to determine what they had done to it as I was, at the moment, effectively out of business.  

Mission number three was to change that.    

Amy checked what she could from her end and told me their records showed that PNG was carrying our long distance, and that given the recordings being produced, logic says that whatever is going on has to be the result of something done by AT&T.  I assume she is about to tell me to call them.  To my surprise, and gratitude, she instead said, “Let’s get them on the line, see if we can conference them into a conversation with both of us.” 

Amy put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back on the line and announced that she had an AT&T representative named Walter on the line.  One little wrinkle though, Amy advised me.  “Walter says he is unable to speak to you while I am on the line.”

I don’t recall my exact response, but it was something in the general neighborhood of “Why the hell not?”  I actually had more to say, and said it, but the rest of my response was not audible.  AT&T isn’t the only one who can hoist finger salutes. 

“It’s our policy,” Walter responded, as if that’s all we needed to know. 

That was worth two salutes.  He got them both.

“Amy,” I said, “I don’t trust AT&T as far as I can throw them.  How do I get back in touch with you if I get cut off or blown off?” 

“I’ll call you back in a few minutes,” she responded, no hesitation in her voice.    

Whereupon Walter, who was mister imperious just a moment ago, suddenly decided, and announced, that upon further consideration, he may not have the expertise required to assist us after all.  “Let me get you in touch with a department that might be better suited to help you,” he back-peddled with a swiftness that spoke of roots in public office.     

Coward. 

I was put back on hold. 

A few minutes went by. 

Amy then came back on the line and announced, “I have another AT&T rep that should be able to help us out.  Wanda, are you there?”

Yep.  Believe it?

For a fleeting second I dared to hope it might be a different Wanda.  After all, the AT&T global customer support department has to have at least, what?……nine or ten English speaking people in it?…..so there were measurable odds on the possibility that two of them, at least theoretically, could be named Wanda. 

Right? 

Nope.  No luck there.  It was the same one.   Ms. Wanda “I’ll Get Back to You” Devereaux. 

And she remembered me, although probably not as well as I remembered her. 

But, desperate times require desperate measures, and when the chips are down you take what you can get, so I sucked up my disbelief and disappointment and explained to Wanda how the matter we were discussing a few weeks ago – uncertainty over who was providing our long distance – was apparently still an open question and had indeed become a problem.  I described the messages we were getting, what was virtually a total loss of service, and the impact it was all having on our ability to engage in the orderly conduct of business.

“And not to turn our attention away from critical needs,” I added, finding myself unable to resist a zing or two, “but it appears you haven’t made much progress on the billing issues either.  However, before I devote any time to that……”       

“Oh, but I left you a message,” she interrupted, then hurriedly went on to claim that she had called me and had left word that she’d spoken to their billing people and had confirmed that all amounts we’d been invoiced were accurate. 

My brain went churning into overdrive, rapidly reviewing available alternative euphemisms for the broad general concept of horse doo-doo.  Somehow, and believe me, near superhuman effort was required here, I kept it all bottled up.  As appropriate and satisfying as it would have been to point out that I doubted any such call had ever been made, and that I knew with certainty that no such message had ever been left, I instead managed to respond with only silence.  “I still have your file right here,” she added, trying to fill the void, as if that additional fact might somehow lend credence to her tale.  It did not.   

“ We’ll come back to that at another time,” I said through clenched teeth.  “For now, I need you to identify what has happened to my phone lines, and get it fixed.”  

I then ran her through a detailed list of the issues.  Two lines were dead, leading to the message “your toll service is blocked”.  Two more lines were dead, leading to the message “the number you have reached is not in service”.  On the other three lines, the noise and static was so bad that they might as well be completely offline.  Further, when dialing the verification number (700-555-4141), one line says NOS Communications is the carrier, the other six say MCI is the carrier, one or all of which are wrong.  And, just to round things out, to the best of my knowledge, long distance charges are still going to AT&T, not PNG. 

She said she had it all, then promised that their technical people would be looking into it.  She added that as soon as they told her something, she’d pass it along. 

In other words, those famous last words……..

“I’ll get back to you.” 

———————————————————

Precisely ten minutes later Wanda called back and cheerfully informed me that she had just called each of our phones numbers and had gotten through to our voice mail system each time.    

“Well, that’s nice,” I responded, “but getting phone calls into the building has not been the problem.  It’s getting calls to go out.”

Her reply?

“Oh.  Yeah.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Wanda called me back a few hours later.  It was roughly 2:30 pm on September 28th.

She told me without preamble that she had spoken to their technical people and they have confirmed that everything is now programmed and working properly. 

“So what was the problem?  What went wrong?” I asked.

“The wrong PIC Code was used,” she explained.  “0555 is not the code we use for MCI.  It should be 222 instead, and that’s what has now been programmed into the AT&T system.”     

Already I don’t like the way this is going.

“Time out,” I interject.  “I told you that the PIC Code we need is 0555.  PNG gave me that number, and they have since verified that number.  I provided that number to your people back in July and I’ve confirmed it several times since.”

“That may be,” she says, “but we have our own numbering system, and 222 is what we use for MCI.”

“Why do you keep talking about MCI?  I told you weeks ago that the carrier we should have been switched to might have been MCI, but then again, it might not.  I also told you, very clearly, that the one thing I was certain of was that the PIC Code I needed was 0555.”

“But that’s the wrong number.” 

If there was a wall nearby I would have been pounding my head into it.  I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm. 

“When, precisely, was PIC Code 222 programmed in?”

“Just now, today,” she replies.

“This afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“So what caused all the problems with the lines this morning?”

“You were trying to use the wrong PIC Code.”

I hang my head.  I want to scream.  I swear, I am not making this up.

“Okay, let me try this,” I hope a different approach might work better.  “Who have I been billed by before today?  Who’s been sticking it to me for $.67 a minute?”

“AT&T, but that’s only because your numbers had not been designated to go to MCI.  The result was that your calls rolled into an undefined plan.  Remember, you had a calling plan with us.  You cancelled it.”

“Yes, I did, but I instructed you to send my call traffic to PIC Code 0555.  In July.  You’re now telling me that never happened.”

“Yes, because you asked for the wrong PIC Code,” she replied.

I briefly debate whether I’m listening to obfuscational double-speak of Congressional quality, or the ravings of a certifiable idiot.  I detect evidence of both. 

Either way, she has me caught in the grips of a Catch-22.  This could go back and forth all day, and while it does, I’m getting nowhere.  I don’t even know if I have functioning phone lines yet.     

“Your lines should work just fine now,” she said as if she’d just read my mind.  She sounded eager to end the discussion.

“That remains to be seen,” I say, “but rest assured I’ll test them as soon as we’re done here.  In the meantime, what do I do when I get reach PNG and they tell me the PIC Code you used is wrong?”

“That shouldn’t happen”, she says.  “If they get their records right, everything should be okay.” 

“And if they aren’t?” I press.

“Oh, feel free to call me.  At any time.”         

Uh-huh.  I think I’d sooner volunteer to have a series of root canals performed.  In total darkness.  By a chimpanzee.  Without anesthesia.  I somehow managed to keep the thought to myself.     

Before hanging up I told her that while there’s nothing I’d like better than to never need to speak to her again, I felt fairly confident I would be, and probably soon.  

As soon as I got off the phone I tested all the lines.  The recordings on three of the four lines were gone.  Line 1, however, was still putting out the “your toll service has been blocked” message.  I then tried the 700 number on each line.  Line 6 still says the long distance carrier is NOS Communications.  All the other lines tell me the carrier is MCI.

I went outside.  Found some stairs.  Did my best Rocky Balboa impersonation.  Knocked a few dozen insects into next week.  Scared the hell out of some passersby.   When I finally trudged back inside ten minutes later, various thoughts of mayhem had cooled.  A little.   

——————————————-

As I continued to replay that last conversation in my mind, I became increasingly certain that at any minute, someone was going to walk through my door, show me a hidden camera, and congratulate me for being on the threshold of reality television stardom.  Maybe it was a remake of the old Candid Camera show.  Perhaps Fear Factor was back, with a few new twists.  Maybe it was a slow week for 60 Minutes and Morely Safer was about to make an appearance.  Sanity was not an explanation for what had just occurred.  It had to be something else.    

Late in the afternoon, Amy from PNG called me.  She was just following up, making sure everything had gone as hoped.  As calmly as possible I told her what had transpired, including my best effort to recite the tale of 0555 versus 222.    

“No, no, no!  WRONG, WRONG, WRONG,” she yelled when I finished.  I continued to explain that line one was still blocked, and line 6 still says the long distance carrier is NOS Communications.  I can hear Amy clenching her teeth.  I understand the feeling.    

“I’d like you to sit tight,” she finally said.  “I’m going to get in touch with AT&T.  It may be Wanda, or her supervisor, or her supervisor’s supervisor, but I’m going to find someone and they are going to talk to us.  I’ll be back to you.”

And with that she was gone, leaving behind the ehco of those magic words again.

But this time, I was willing to bet they were going to come true.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was after 5:00 pm when Amy called back, but call back she did.  She said she had spoken to seven different people in the intervening thirty minutes, and the last of them, a gentleman by the name of Scott Buddenhagen, was about to join us.  She brought him onto the line. 

Buddenhagen was a low-key sort of guy, quiet and soft-spoken.  With a stoically detached and unemotional efficiency, he moved without enthusiasm through the subjects of interest.  Two points of decided interest quickly emerged.    

One, he promised that the PIC Codes would be changed first thing the next morning.  There was no attempt to explain, justify or defend what had occurred prior to this discussion.  No finger pointing, no expressions of anguish, no means or manner of apology.  He just calmly promised to get them changed.

Take that, Wanda.

Two, according to Buddenhagen, who evidently had online access to our account history, the one and only order ever made to change our PIC Codes had been logged into their system on the 17th of September.  Not in July, when the request had first been filed and then confirmed.  Not in August, when someone at AT&T had (apparently) turned off their own company as my long distance carrier and replaced them with……no one.  Not during the marathon call session I endured back in early September, getting bounced from coast to coast by an automated phone system that eventually, but only reluctantly, allowed me access to a human being.

No, he said there were no orders logged until September 17th. 

As this is written, and this sentence is being put to paper in mid November, I have no idea where or when this ever-growing tale of telecommunications intrigue is going to end, but I do know this with certainty.  Before I close the book on AT&T for good, somebody, somewhere, is going to have to tell me how the hell that’s possible.

Do you hear me AT&T?

September 17th?

Are you sh………serious?        

With that question neither voiced nor answerable at the time, Buddenhagen recapped the following points:

1) The order for changing PIC Codes will be placed first thing the next morning.   It was already after hours and too late to get it done the same day we spoke.  He will call to confirm when the task had been completed.  

2) There are going to be switching fees.  He will inform me what those fees are when calls.   

3) As to billing and credits, not his department.

Of course it’s not.  It never is.   

Amy, who had been listening in throughout, informed me she would be out of the office and unreachable for the next two days, but promised she would check in the day after, which would be Thursday, October 1, just to verify that everything was as under control as it seemed to be right then.

———————————————–

The next day was the 29th of September.  While I was on another line, Buddenhagen called and left a message – it was around two in the afternoon – which said that all lines had been re-coded to PIC Code 0555 at 11:20 that morning.  He thanked me for my patience and wished me a good day.

He neglected to leave any information about switching fees, but I waved off the oversight.  It seemed a given that the fees would be outrageous, and I figured I’d just add them to the growing laundry list of financial issues that were still awaiting resolution.   Besides, I had actually witnessed an AT&T employee following up on a commitment, doing something they had promised to do, and given the groundbreaking nature of that event, I didn’t want to spoil the moment with the introduction of details.    

Still, having become inherently distrustful of anything AT&T, there was one more exercise to complete.  Around 3:30 pm I began to independently verify the accuracy of his message.

I discovered that line 1 was working again.  Okay, that was progress.

Then I began dialing the 700 number from each line.

Where I discovered that six of the seven lines produced a recording that said, “thank you for choosing MCI”.  The seventh line led to a recording that thanked me for choosing NOS Communications.  

I tested everything twice.   Same result both times.

Which was, of course, the same result as was produced the day before. 

In other words, nothing had changed.

Unbelievable.

Twenty minutes and a bit of phone tag later, I had Buddenhagen on the line.  Within seconds, my once nascent sense of victory, relief and – dare I say it? – esprit de corps, was headed right out to sea.    

After a bit of hemming and hawing, he said that getting the MCI recording on six lines was actually possible.  There had been all kinds of recent consolidations and mergers in the telecom industry, he explained, and MCI has been part of several of them.  He said they actually show PIC Code 0555 as belonging to WorldCom, but it’s his belief that WorldCom and MCI are related, perhaps one and the same.  Whatever the relational explanation, the PIC Code for those lines is 0555, as requested.

He then told me that the recording I’m getting on line 6 – NOS Communications – is not possible. 

I expressed a contrary viewpoint on that one.   

As part of the search for an explanation, he asked me to try dialing a new number from each line.  He told me the number – 1-203-700-4141 – identifies instate long distance carriers.  The 700 number I’ve tested previously is for identifying out of state long distance.

I put him on hold and gave the new number a try on all open lines.  In each instance it led to a recording that said, “Sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed.”  I got him back on the line and told him as much.  Once again, he said that was not possible.  Once again I expressed a contrary viewpoint. 

Something along the lines of “guess again”.

He told me he was unsure what was going on, but suggested we probably needed to speak to PNG.  “It has to be something they did,” he speculated.

“And I suspect they’ll say this is your work,” I countered.  “All of which is academic anyway.  The only person at PNG who knows what’s going on, and who I trust to deal with it, is Amy, and she’s out and unreachable until Thursday.”

Buddenhagen then suggested I might want to call AT&T Repair and have them look into the whole situation.  He gave me their phone number.  The reason he suggested them, he said, is they might be able to “ping” the lines, to remotely send a signal that might help them detect the existence of any continuing problems.  

Though probably well-intentioned, obviously this guy had never personally endured the agony of trying to reach someone at AT&T – especially somebody in repair – from the outside.  At that precise moment, I was once again able to make phone calls from all lines, so the immediate crisis had been averted.   I decided I’d had enough grief and aggravation for one week.  I wasn’t about to voluntarily go looking for more.  

So, I diplomatically waved off his suggestion that AT&T Repair be called.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

On the morning of Wednesday, September 30, I arrived at the office and found a general voice mail message that had come in at sometime during the overnight.  The message was from “Vivian at AT&T Repair” and it advised me “the issue that you are unable to verify your carrier has been resolved.  Please dial 1-203-700-4141 to confirm.  We will leave this ticket open for now, but someone from repair will give you a call in the morning to verify that everything is taken care of”.

Given that I had decided to eschew making voluntary contact with AT&T Repair, I had to assume that this unexpected message was the result of Scott Buddenhagen’s work.  

You may recall that there were two issues still present at the close of business the day before.  Issue one, when dialing the number for verifying the in-state long distance carrier (203-700-4141) I was getting a message saying that the call could not be completed as dialed.  This morning I dialed that number from each line.  To my mild surprise, it actually worked on all seven lines.

Issue two, line 6 had been telling me the day before that the long distance carrier on that line was NOS Communications.  There is one difference this morning.  I am now able to confirm that NOS comes up on both in-state and out-of-state long distance.  

Vivian’s message told me that someone from AT&T Repair would be calling this morning.  I decided to bring the matter up with them when they called. 

Assuming, of course, that they actually did call.

———————————————

They did not.  Call, that is.

I periodically dialed the verification numbers again, just to see if anything changed, but I continued to get recordings that thanked me for choosing NOS Communications.      

Part of me was aching to just let it go; to ignore it all; to take the position that I had nothing to do with creating this mess in the first place, so why should I take it upon myself to assume responsibility for getting it fixed?  But, at the same time, another part of me was hearing warning signals, was casting a wary eye on angry storm clouds roiling on the horizon, portending disaster, calling out to me in a sinister voice that said, get this resolved now, before it morphs into something even bigger down the road.

Because let’s face it, this company, it appears, this thing called AT&T, is riddled with people who have no accountability, no incentive to perform, and no standard or measure of performance, even if there was an incentive.  They tell their customers whatever may be expedient at the moment, whatever they feel like telling them, without devotion to or interest in whether their words are accurate, or even truthful.  They do not follow-up, not as a matter of course, not even when they swear they will.  They tell you one thing and do something else.  Their promises are as substantive as empty air.

They have no credibility.

They.  Just.  Don’t.  Care!

Which means that to leave this unattended to today is to risk it remaining unattended to next month, next year, and for many years and generations to come, possibly ad infinitum.

So, I called Scott Buddenhagen, and after a bit of phone tag, we spoke late that afternoon.  I told him about the communication from his repair department, about the half of the job they completed, and about the follow-up they failed to complete.  I characterized it all as par for the course.  I got the sense it was nothing he hadn’t heard before.

He proceeded to tell me that the reason the in-state verification line had failed to work yesterday was due to a programming issue on a regional level.  It turns out that no one within a ten mile radius of my office had been able to use that number for……they weren’t sure for how long.  That’s now been fixed.  I asked if I was going to get a reward for having helped them discover that their system was broken.  He laughed.  I guess he thought I was joking.     

As to the reason for NOS Communications to keep popping up on the verification line, he told me there is no discernable reason why that should be happening.  Still, he admitted, there has to be a reason, so in recognition of that reality, he’s going to open another repair ticket and get someone to look into it.

“Let me guess,” I finished the topic for him.  “Someone will get back to me.  Right?”

“Well, yes,” he said.  “Yes, they will.”

—————————————————

I spoke to Amy again on October 2nd.   She had called just to touch base, just to see if we needed anything.  To my inquiry, she informed me that she had been able to verify that all of our call activity was being properly routed to PNG.  We briefly discussed the continuing message claiming the continuing presence of NOS as the carrier on line 6, but she assured me that was not actually the case.  I finally decided to just let it go, though I confess that I still have an occasional nightmare wherein an eighteen wheeler pulls up outside my office door for delivery of a six thousand volume NOS phone bill.    

——————————————–

As of mid-November, roughly six weeks later, the verification number still says I am being served by NOS Communications.

There has been no further contact with anyone at AT&T.

——————————————-
As a side note, I offer a word or two of unsolicited advice to the executive wing at PNG.  I don’t know how much Amy Mounce is getting paid by you folks, but it’s probably not enough.  Do your company a favor; take care of her.  If you don’t, she is the kind of employee that people like me make every effort to steal away from people like you.

And to the executive wing at AT&T?  Your entire service organization needs an enema. 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

With service restored, at least for that moment, a few days later I returned once more to the matter of AT&T invoices.

You may recall that in one of my conversations with Wanda “I’ll Get Back to You” Devereaux, she claimed that she had spoken to AT&T’s billing people, and they had allegedly decreed that all amounts billed, to that point, were accurate.

This, of course, was the gospel according to Wanda, the same Wanda whose circuitous discussion of PIC Codes had been more reminiscent of an Abbott and Costello routine than an advisory service.  Given that performance, I thus had some reservations about blindly accepting her second hand telling of an unverified decree allegedly made by a nameless and faceless entity.

Looking back over my own notes, I had informed Wanda that there were billing issues on September 10th  and 11th.  I had informed her again on the 28th of September.  Scott Buddenhagen was given the same information at the end of September.  The amount paid on the invoice I had received for period ending August 15th, the one with the $1,485.00 Contract Commitment Charge, had been reduced by the amount of that charge back in mid-September.

Put it all together and there can be no question that AT&T had been informed there was a problem.  And yet, nothing had happened.

No calls had been placed.  No inquiries had been made.  No fact-finding had occurred.  Instead the collective corporate reaction had been stick its head in sand; to see hear and speak no evil; to leave it alone in the apparent hope that it would go away.  Three blind mice.  See how they run.     

Or, as the t-shirt said, DILLIGAF? 

And so it came to pass that in late September, another AT&T invoice arrived, this one for the period ended September 15th .   This one contained a newly billed total of almost three thousand bucks, the vast majority of which resulted from over billed long distance charges on service that was hijacked in the first place.

So, for the second consecutive month, an inflated invoice was reduced to a more reasonable level before being paid.  This time a letter as enclosed with the check.  I won’t bore you with all of the details, but excerpts included:

To Whom it May Concern;

Your company was fired as my long distance carrier on July 6, 2009.  The reasons were many and varied, but can best be summed up as failure to perform the tasks for which you were engaged, under the conditions by which you were engaged to perform them.  Between July 6 and October 2, 2009, I was engaged in an ongoing effort to actually get rid of you by getting my service switched to the long distance carrier of my choosing.  During those three months, your company repeatedly failed to follow instructions, which has resulted in a variety of billing issues, all of which attempt to provide your company with unearned, windfall revenues.  With that provided as a general background, let me explain what has transpired in the recent past, and what is further transpiring herein.    

Subsequent to your dismissal on July 6, I received an invoice from you, dated August 15, 2009, in the amount of $2,112.17.  A significant portion of that invoice - $1,485.00 – was a single entry identified as “Contract Commitment Charge”.  There are two noteworthy observations I submit in response to that charge.  One, the $1,485.00 charge is, in my view, an attempt by your company to be rewarded for having failed miserably to adequately perform and provide services to my company.  It’s rather like a corrupt politician being voted out of office, and rationalizing that he’s owed a few extra years salary before leaving.  Two, a review of the August 15 invoice will clearly show that AT&T was still providing my long distance service anyway, from which we can only conclude that even if your attempt at extortion was acceptable, by your own twisted logic, the facts fail to support the notion that you had even earned it.  My God, you must have former Enron accountants working for you.

As a result, I made a payment against the August 15 invoice in the amount of $452.47.  That was the amount of the previous month’s (7/09) invoice, and by my calculations, should have been the amount of the August invoice as well.

This time around your efforts toward unjust enrichment have centered on raising my per minute call rate from block of time rates that ranged from less than $.05  cents per minute, billed in 10 second increments, to a whopping $.67 per minute, billed in full minute increments.  And once again, despite your services having been cancelled, AT&T was still holding my long-distance service hostage.  As I read it, that corrupt politician wasn’t happy with merely stealing a couple of extra years salary – he gave himself a hell of raise in the process!

Quite frankly, I don’t know what to call this.  Punitive pricing?  Extortion?  Fraud? 

Whatever, it’s not going to work. 

Since receiving your August invoice, I have spent many hours on the phone with AT&T representatives trying to get my long distance service provider properly designated, and my billing properly straightened out.   You are currently approved for providing my local phone service at the rate of $327.88 per month.  Even though you should have been separated from any further long distance activities or charges back in July, I will go ahead and recognize the monthly block of time charges I had previously agreed to, but only for one more month.  That monthly charge is $90.00.  Adding in taxes and fees, I go back once again to the amount of my July 15, 2009 bill - $452.47.  That amount was paid against my August 15 invoice, and is hereby paid against my September 15 invoice as well.  After application of those two amounts, I expect and will accept no less than issuance of a credit for the rest of your $5,029.26 charges.  All of them.  No exceptions. 

Your abiding by this expectation will help us all to avoid costly, lengthy and embarrassing legal remedies.  It is my hope that your company makes the right decision. 

Yours truly,
 

That letter was mailed, along with a check, on October 8.

A copy of that letter was sent to Kevin, my “go-to” guy at Total Communications, Inc., aka TCI, of East Hartford, CT.  Kevin, of course, hasn’t graced these pages in a while, primarily because he and his company were fired back on July 6.

In the months that have passed since that eventful day, one thing I have found interesting is that while AT&T clearly embraces the belief that they can only be replaced if the decision to do so is theirs, Kevin and company have accepted reality like adults.  They have done what was asked of them.  They just went away.

Nevertheless, because this ridiculous tale refuses to end, it becomes increasingly difficult to project an ending that does not include lawyers.  And of course, once they get involved, pillagers and destroyers that they are, the real trouble will begin.  Money will begin to flow like rivers, paper will begin to fall like a ticker tape parade, and Kevin and his boys will be sitting there right alongside the rest of us, hoping that Armageddon will arrive soon, starting with the local bar association.

So even if Kevin may be in little danger of being labeled an over-achiever in the field of customer service, I can also understand that his attempting to liaise with AT&T must have been a lot like trying to eat soup with a fork.   On that basis, it seemed only fair to warn him that this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, over.

CHAPTER TWENTY

On October 23rd, a new AT&T invoice arrived, this one for the period ending October 15th.  It was instantly evident that the logic expressed in the letter I’d sent with my last payment had fallen on deaf ears.

While my payments from the past two months had been received and processed, all other charges and balances had been carried forward.  Some late fees had been added.  I found $124.00 in long distance carrier switching fees had been added to the pile.  And there was more of the same nonsense on long distance charges; inflated costs per minute for US, even more for international, blah, blah, blah.  Altogether, just over $2,000.00 in new charges had been added.  The total invoice amount was now up to $6,166.39. 

But something was…….not quite right.  Something beyond the obvious, I mean.

On my third spin through the bill I finally realized what was wrong; the itemized call activity did not represent a full month.  In fact, it only represented a week, with all of the calls I was currently being billed for having been made between September 15th and 22nd.  

Now to repeat a point of comparison made a month earlier, if I had kept AT&T as my long distance provider, a reasonable total for the invoice would have been around $450.00.  If they had processed my change orders as instructed, providing no long distance service, it would have been a little over $300.00.  In both cases, those are costs for a month.

Yet here I was, looking at over $2000 in new charges, and the bill on which those charges appeared represented just a week’s worth of activity.  One week.  Seven days, only five of which were business days.

I began to think that Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James and Bernie Madoff were alive and well and running a phone company.

So, that bill arrived on Friday the 23rd of October.  I was still debating what it meant and what to try to do about it when another eye opening bill arrived the following Monday, the 26th.  The new one was from…..

MCI.

Wanda had struck again.  

Sitting in my hands was a bill from MCI which detailed 295 itemized calls, all made between the 23rd and 28th of September.  Each call was billed at $.85 per minute, with full minute billing increments.  The total amount of the bill was $400.59.

Now, follow the timeline here.

September 28th was the day our phones died, early in the morning, with the reason for that death, according to Wanda, having been our use of the wrong PIC Code.  Remember the whole Abbott and Costello meets Daffy Duck routine during which she attempted to point the fault in our direction?  Then later, she claimed responsibility for restoring our service by switching us over to the PIC Code for MCI.  That switch, and she was adamant on this point, was made on the afternoon of the 28th.   

The MCI bill showed that 294 calls had been made between the 23rd and 25th of September.  The 26th and 27th were the weekend, so no calls or charges appeared for those two days.  The bill then showed a single call having been made on Monday the 28th, at 9:30 am.  The phones went down after that time. 

So Wanda, and/or any of you other yahoos at AT&T, who among you has the courage to even try to explain this to me?  By your version of events, I was an MCI Customer (however unwitting or unwilling) for about twenty hours.  So how is it I’m getting bills from them that precede by five days the date you claimed you switched me over to them?  How is it that calls made, apparently using the MCI PIC Code, seemed to work just fine for a few days, and then suddenly choked on the morning of the 28th because “we” were using the wrong PIC Code?  How is it that the phones suddenly began to work again after you switched us to the PIC Code you had obviously already switched us to the week before? 

What really happened on the morning of the 28th to kill our phone service? 

What kind of nonsense are you people peddling?

I’ve spent the past few decades interacting on a daily basis with folks who live in the worlds of business, sales and even politics.  As a result of those dealings, I’ve been lied to so many times in my life that I often wonder if I even still have the capacity to recognize the truth when I hear it.

But nothing I’ve ever been exposed to before prepared me for what has been shoveled in my direction by AT&T.  You people have raised the bar to a whole new level.  You have elevated BS to a life form that has never been seen in the past, and will probably never be matched again in the future.           

Un-be-lieveable!

So there I sat, bills to the left of me, bills to the right, the peculiar aroma of fraud, deceit, misrepresentation, misinformation and more outright lies than I can even count, wafting around me.  I had gotten real tired of dealing with this crap.  

I finally packed up the MCI bill in its entirety and returned it to them with a short note pointing out that I am not currently a customer of theirs, I have never willingly been a customer of theirs, and based on the prices they seem to charge ($.85 a minute?) there seems little likelihood I will ever be a customer of theirs.  I wished them well and suggested that they direct any questions they may have to AT&T.      

As to AT&T, for the third month in a row, I reduced the amount of their invoice and sent them a letter.  Well, two letters actually.  I ran a copy of the letter from the month before, then drafted and sent the following with it.

To whom it may concern:

Following this note is a copy of a letter that was sent to you people thirty days ago.  The acts and the pattern of behavior described in that letter have not changed in the past month, so rather than keep regurgitating the same story from one billing period to the next, I’ve decided to just send another copy of the same communication.  You completely ignored the first one.  You’ve completely ignored other letters I’ve sent.  I’m confident you will completely ignore this one as well. 

Enclosed is check for the same amount I remitted last month, and the month before that.  The reasons for the adjusted payment amount have not changed.  The method of calculation is identical.  Both are explained in the enclosed letter copy, which you will, or course, ignore.

Yours truly,

So is that the end of the tale?  Frankly, I doubt it.  That’s where it sat as of November 17, 2009, but the calendar tells me that I will soon be receiving new telephone invoices, so there’s no telling what kind of new annoyances, mysteries and/or assorted nonsense is still to come.

As this is written, the scheming bastards have billed me for over $5,700.00 in bogus charges, fees and punitively inflated costs that they have not earned nor are they entitled to.   Based on their behavior to date, I find it nearly inconceivable that they won’t continue trying to pile it on.  While time will tell on that one, this much is certain; I will probably spend the rest of my life associating the name AT&T with staggering degrees of incompetence, a near zero devotion to truth, and the integrity of a gang of crack addicts.

Beyond that, who knows?  For now, I just sit and wait.

—————————————

Post Script Note entered on December 2.  Last week a new bill arrived from AT&T.  The amount billed for the current period was accurate.  All other accumulated overcharges were still on the invoice, listed as Past Due.    

A day later another invoice from MCI showed up, this one for the same amount as the month before, with the entire amount listed as Past Due. 

It appears that AT&T’s brand of DILLIGAF? based customer service is either contagious, or it is also the modus operandi of MCI. 

Well guess what MCI?  I gave you the courtesy of a response to your first invoice.  From this point forward, send anything you want.  There is a circular file at the foot of my desk just waiting to receive it. 

And AT&T?  As to your invoice? 

Do I look like I give…..?

=======================================

Post Script Note entered February 8, 2010. 

First off, since this whole thing began nearly a year ago, it has become a point of increasing certainty to me that just as bars have beer and stray dogs have fleas, at least a majority of telecommunications companies have idiots working for them.  AT&T proved its leadership in that regard a long time ago.  I have come to find out they are not alone.          

On December 14, 2009, my general voice mail took a call from someone reporting to be named Tamika.  She claimed to be from Verizon, and her message politely asked for someone to please call 800-765-8218.  “And please have your account number handy,” she added. 

My first reaction was, now why in the world would Verizon be calling me?  And better yet, why in the world would they be of the opinion that I have an account number with them?  Was it some kind of a sales ploy? I wondered.  Maybe Tamika was trying to spur some new traffic by randomly calling people, hoping that what most folks would take as a mistaken call would generate call-backs, at which time she could launch into a performance aimed at showing them what they’ve missed by not having an account with her company?  If so, it didn’t strike me as a tactic that was likely to yield a lot of results.  Or make too many friends.  

The next day, while I was still vaguely debating whether the strategy suggested greater kinship to Machiavelli or Daffy Duck, another message was left on the general voice mail.  The first thing I noticed was that it was Tamika again, she being the possessor of a soft, demure, quite pleasant and utterly unmistakable voice.  The second thing I noticed was that she did not leave her name this time.  The  third thing I noticed, and this was the best one of all, was that this time she claimed she was calling on behalf of MCI.  The call-back number was the same, and the request to have an account number handy was repeated. 

So, yesterday Verizon, today MCI.  I couldn’t wait to see who she was going to call on behalf of tomorrow. 

Radio Free Europe?

Of course, I immediately concluded that these calls were directly related to a continuation of the idiocy formented by AT&T.  Because that in itself was more than enough to torpedo any token interest I might have had in talking to Tamika or anyone else at her company, I brushed it off.  It went quiet for a few days, and I quickly forgot about the whole thing. 

Until Friday, December 18th, that is, when a letter showed up in the mail.  It was from Verizon.  It informed me that my “Verizon account has been cancelled and a balance of $400.59 remains unpaid.  If payment in full is not received by 12/24/2009; your account may be assessed additional fees and referred to a third party for collection.”  Though it contained no signatory name or title, it claimed to have come from:

The one bright point of that letter is that I finally undertood why Tamika was inconsistent about who she worked for.  The disturbing element was that instead of her apparent uncertainty being a suspected case of schizophrenia, it now looked more like a case of corporate incest.  Seems to be a lot of that going around in the telecommunications industry.  Maybe inside the beltway as well, though that’s probably a discussion for another day.         

On Monday, December 21, another phone message came through.  Once again someone claiming to be from Verizon left a message, but this time it wasn’t Tamika.  Actually, I’m not sure who it was, as they left no name, but there could be no question that it was an entirely different person.  The soft demure and pleasant voice had been replaced by something that sounded more like a rusty fence gate.  A gate with an abundance of attitude.  I pictured it coming from a stout body, probably with a hint of facial hair.  Maybe some chewing tobacco.  And a swastika.  Or two. 

It sounded like they were getting ready to cut loose the goon squad.  I was ready for them to bring it on, but I was also getting annoyed all over again.  Through no fault, action or desire of my own, and without my knowledge or consent, I was made an MCI customer for three business days, during which time they charged me rates that would make most of America’s credit card companies blush with shame.  Meanwhile, once again I had given a phone company the courtesy of a written response pointing out both the inaccuracy and unfairness of their billing, but just like AT&T, I might as well have addressed that letter to the man in the moon.  

On December 22, Tamika was back, claiming to be from MCI this time, and leaving her same message.  She repeated the effort on the 23rd. 

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that Icould not ignore the possibility that AT&T and MCI may be working collusively here.  I mean think about it, AT&T forces me onto MCI despite clear instructions to the contrary, MCI jumps in with a one thousand percent (or so) rate hike, and then the two of them sit back and and ignore all efforts to fix their screw-ups.  Is someone splitting the difference?  Does AT&T organize these little coups, and then get back a percentage as a finder’s fee? 

Hell, is Wanda related to Tamika?  Better yet, are they the same person?           

Think it’s a crazy thought?  Try this one on for size.  Anyone calling into our offices will find no difficulty getting in touch with a live person.  Hence the simple fact that MCI / Verizon / Radio Free Europe representatives resorted, right from the start, to leaving messages, tells me that their desire to actually get through to someone was cursory, at best. 

On December 23, I sent another letter off to MCI, even though I had previously said I would not.  The letter went to the address in Chicago that they provided.  Here’s what it said.

Dear Verizon:

On the page immediately following this note is a copy of a letter recently received from your company.

Following that is the content of a note that I sent to your company in early November of this year.  It is evident that one or more persons in your company chose to ignore that note.  Thus I am sending you another one.  Please pay attention this time. 

 Ready?

I am not a customer of yours.  I have never willingly or knowingly been a custonmer of yours.  I have never attempted to become a customer of yours.  There is a reasonable certainty that at no point in the future will I ever be a customer of yours.   

That said, I offer you two suggestions.  First, quit sending me bills, reminders or threats.  You are wasting postage and paper in doing so.

Second, you have recently become part of a long and still expanding story of telecommunications lunacy that stars AT&T.  If you are curious about your role, and how you came to be involved in it, please feel free to read all about it at: http://www/iqsurvey.com/blog/?p=2.  There you will find a very long story entitled A CUSTOMER SATISFACTION TALE OF HORROR. 71

If you wish to achieve a more starring role in the tale, keep sending me threats.

Best regards,

Did that take care of it, you may wonder? 

Nope. 

Another waste of paper. 

In early January I received a notice from a collection agency called Harvard Collection Services of Chicago demanding payment of $540.79 as agent for MCI.  Guess they decided to tack on a little for themselves.  Today, and this post is being entered on February 8, 2010, I received the same notice again.  Evidently they will be sending me reminders on a monthly basis.  Always nice to have something to look forward to.

And silly me, but I find I can’t help but wonder if AT&T happens to own a collection agency.  In Chicago.   

Meanwhile, the telecommunicatiosn miscreants that started all of this continue to send through a monthly bill, full of all kinds of unpaid and overdue charges, $5,930 worth at last count, a figure which is rising with the imposition of escalating late fees every month.  Added to MCI’s claimed cut of the action, and that of their hired guns, and the total amount of the extortion attempt here is now up to $6,470.  And 79 cents.               

And for now, the end remains completely out of sight…..

……and the beat goes on.