AT&T.. sucks.

Let me tell you how much I hate AT&T in the form of a long-winded story.

We have a few excellent Sprint EVDO usb modems at the ENTP office, and I was looking into getting some more as we grow from 3, 4, to 8, to almost 14 (!) people. I’d had a good, but costly, experience so far with Sprint; free devices, $60 a month unlimited with 1.5MBPS download speeds. But just for shits and giggles, decided to get a few AT&T 3G modems to compare. I get a reasonable corporate discount with all the iPhones we already have, and my iPhone experience was only reasonably bad. Which is saying a lot for phone companies.

I put in two orders, one to our LA, California address, and the other to Portland, Oregon. In retrospect, the ordering process should have been the first warning sign: nickel-and-diming me on bandwidth charges. 5GB max? Seriously? Anyway.

The two modem packages arrived a few days later .. to Oregon .. without any paperwork or anything much in the box other than the massive, almost comically clunky modems (compare with the Sprint modem to the right). We spent a few hours trying to figure out how to make the damn things connect. You plug it into USB, and a flash drive pops up, which contains a PDF guide on using the device, and the driver software. Once installed, the drive no longer shows up, and you can’t find the PDF again.

Eventually, someone called AT&T and after a long time on hold was told that they needed a SIM card. Two or three calls to AT&T later (usually ends in the line being disconnected) we find out that they were supposed to ship a SIM card with the device. Excellent. Let’s get some SIM cards.

You’d think for a telephone company, they’d be able to sort out their own telephone system. But, this is tragically not the case. I’ve worked in call centers. They’re shitty places to work. You have to read a scripted response while performing tasks that take longer than your mandated average call time of three-minutes-fifteen-seconds. Generally you have to also have a certain number of actions per hour. This, of course, is impossible. It’s a combination of brain-dead idiots working the phones and fucktard managers trying to keep them in line.

When you call AT&T, there are many numbers you can try. One gets you through to “Business Premier” support.

Their IVR is “fully automated”, which means you tell it what you want and it figures out where to direct your call. Unfortunately, there isn’t actually a way to get through to a human. They pretend like you can, but the only humans there are in collections. “I WANT A SIM CARD”, I shout. “You want to buy a calling card?” I try the patented Matt Lyon approach to getting a human.

“Operator!”. “Sorry, I can’t-” “FUCK YOU!” Sorry, I can’t -.

At this point I start mashing numbers until it hangs up. I tried almost every option on the IVR, and none of them got me through to a human. So much for business “premier”.

I tried the “online chat” on the website. This was more promising. I actually got some sort of copy/paste “human” who told me in overly formal grammar that I’d have to call up.

Finally, I called the regular customer service number. I told my story in great detail, and the apologetic customer “service” rep offered to deal with the issue by ordering some SIM cards. He put me on hold, then .. “We’re sorry, the system is having technical difficulty. Please try your call again later”. And hung up.

Over the course of two or three weeks I would call customer service, tell my story, they’d put me on hold while they sort it (“I apologize for the inconvenience. I know it must be frustrating to “) They’d put me on hold again, and about 5 minutes later, either another operator would answer, or it would hang up.

One time I actually got someone who told me that “SIM cards are on back order”. You know. AT&T actually has run out of SIM cards. This same joker seemed to be playing the game we used to play back when I worked in call centers, which was to say a given word as many times as you could without the customer recognizing. So, every second word he said was “here”. “So, I’m looking here at your account here, it looks here like you ordered …” You get the point.

I tried to log in to the “business premier portal” today to “request a refund” and cancel my service. You know, the one they’re billing me for and aren’t providing.

I give up.