April 1, 2004

Today I lost it.

I seriously lost it.

For two months now, I've been getting a bill from AT&T, charging me 6 bucks for "Basic Long Distance Service" on my home phone.

Never mind that I've gotten rid of that service months ago. And that I was signed up with MCI before that, and haven't had any business dealings with AT&T for years. And that it's impossible that anybody in my household could have accidentially signed up with them either, because we use our cell phones for pretty much all long-distance calls.

So today I call AT&T Customer Service to resolve the issue. First, I get an obviously outsourced call to India, with an echo in the line and a rep with such bad English, that I have to repeat my phone number 5 times, before he gets it right.

While I patiently explain the situation to him, he constantly puts me on hold "to check on things" and ask me questions like "Is your name Mrs. Melissa Blablabla?", and "Does your account have a charge of $38.65 on it?". No, I repeat - over and over.

An irritated 20 minutes later, I tell him I just want to close the account and get rid of the erroneous charges.

That's when the rep launches into a full-blown story about why I'm getting charged. Apparently, sometimes, when the phone lines are waaaaay busy, people like me, who use their cell phones for long distance calls, get charged a fee (never mind that my cell phone company has zero association with AT&T).

I listen in disbelief. I'm not sure if I want to laugh out loud or verbally bite this guy's head off. I finally decide on the second.

There is little reaction from him. He confirms my phone number again. As if to double-check that my number isn't accidentially listed as an insane asylum. He then persists with the myth of the busy phone line charges.

And that's when I lose it. I tell him to cut the crap, and stop trying to tell me fairy tales, dammit. I've worked in the tech industry, I know a little about how things like phone lines work. And this is not how they work.

Then I remembered that a few years back, while I was still living in California and had Net access via dial-up, I had talked to another AT&T rep, who with the most serious voice he could muster, told me that some mystery charges on my phone bill stemmed from the fact that if I logged on to websites that were hosted in, say, Africa or Europe, I'd pay higher charges. Back then, I laughed out loud.

Not anymore.

I'd finally had enough of the guy who didn't speak English, and yelled at him to connect me to his supervisor. Which he did.

And that man, with a silky, almost accent-free voice told me that he was sorry for the "billing error", and that he would make sure it was all taken care of. He even gave me a "confirmation number", so that I could prove we had talked.

I hung up, feeling at once strangely satisfied and liberated. I had defeated the micro-payment devil that lurks behind every phone company's smiling facade - at least today I had. One down - 50 million to go.

I honestly don't know why people still put up with long-distance phone companies. They are quite simply the biggest and boldest liers and thieves that are in business today.

But hey - next time you feel like letting off a little steam, or your kids can't fall asleep and you're out of ideas for fairy tales, just call your friendly AT&T customer service rep.

The number is 1-800-222-0300.