Have Skills, Will Travel Charles Armour

AT&T Fail

This post is a rant, just to give you a heads up.

For about two months now our phones have been degrading in performance and usability.  The issue is an intermittent inability to make and receive calls, establish a data connection, or send and receive text messages.  Basically useless phones!  If you’ve ever shown 4-5 bars on your AT&T phone, gone to make a call, had it say “Dialing…” for 30 seconds (no ringing) followed by “Call Ended” with a logged talk time of 0 seconds, you know my pain.  Unfortunately, redialing and resetting the phone have no effect.

Before you think I’m ranting about how horrible AT&T’s network is, I want to explain that before these issues started we had very little trouble with our phones, 8 months of good service.  This post is rather about security policies in place at AT&T, in particular their differing policies between their phone service and their brick and mortar service.

You see, a week ago I finally got fed up with having to wardial every time I try to reach someone, so I called AT&T tech support.  A few reboots of my phone showed no improvement, so the technician did a “SIM Update”, citing that our SIM chips had not been updated since the account was opened.  At first blush this seemed to help, but the next day everything was back to normal.  After a couple more phone calls a ticket was set up and I got a voicemail telling me to get the SIM chips replaced.

This afternoon I went in to the storefront with both our phones in hand to get new SIM chips, and was told I couldn’t because of a storefront policy of only allowing hardware changes if Alaina was present or called in from work to set me up.  I explained that not only do I pay for the account, but that I’ve got a ticket number they can check on and I’ve been making changes to the account in the past.  Not a budge, even after asking a manager for help.  I wasn’t very nice myself after that, and had to call back and apologize.

I would understand their position if they didn’t allow you to make any and all changes over the phone with just the last four digits of a social security number for confirmation.  So my AT&T service continues to be broken, their storefronts are full of bureaucrats, and they’ve wasted nearly a day worth of my time.  I’m not sure whether to cancel or not.  I expect that with enough griping I could get a refund for the two months of shoddy service, which should cover any cancellation fee they try to charge.  What do you think I should do?