I have never in my life had the misfortune to work with a company with service as poor as this misbegotten excuse for a telecommunications provider. Ever since they bought SBC (which was no great shakes to begin with), our phone service has been a downhill slide into a stinking mire of service issues. We have had our service cut off. We have had our unlimited long distance converted to a per-minute plan and received multi-thousand dollar phone bills with no notice. We have lost service inexplicably. Our DSL costs MORE than cable for less speed and iffy connectivity.

They always apologize, but what good is an apology when nothing changes in the future? I don’t want an apology, I want good service!

Now we’re moving. What could be more fun than another phone problem? Answer: Three phone problems!

1. At first they refused to speak with anybody but the owner of our business. Come on people, do you really expect to talk to the ‘owner’ of HP or IBM when they call for phone service? We’re not paying $30 a month for a residential line here, and we’re certainly not paying to get ME on the line to move phone lines with everything else on my plate.
2. Then they told us we couldn’t keep our phone number. In the next town over. What? What business moves and discards its phone number? Oh, wait, no, sorry, we can keep it, but for a rate so high it must burn its wings, a Daedalian offering in the telecom world. It’s actually cheaper to reprint all our business cards and letterhead.
3. Finally, despite telling them in VERY clear terms that we’re moving on the 15th, and we want to transfer on that day so we don’t disrupt our own customer service, we’ve just discovered that over the weekend all of our phone lines and DSL service have been shut off. All of them. I suppose we shouldn’t have expected a company for whom customer service is a vague mystery one reads about in books to understand our OWN determination to provide good customer service.

What choice do we have? Not much, in the past, but recently VoIP services have produced better business offerings, and you can bet we’ll be exploring them. Now it’s becoming MUCH clearer why traditional phone companies are fighting VoIP so much. It’s not that customers are switching to get better rates - phone companies are great at competing on price. It’s that they know they can’t compete on service, so retaining monopolistic control over a market is their only hope of staying in business.

AT&T, you get our fax lines, but you can kiss a business customer goodbye for the rest of our account.