SBC, MCI, AT&T, I hate you all!

S

Stop Laughing

New Member
I'm sick of any and all companies that have anything to do with phones now, and I'm sure if cell phones give half the headaches that our regualr lines have gotten, I'll never get one. Where should I begin? I posted this quite a while ago on XiBase:

RANT ON THE PHONE COMPANY

1. Most recent problem: A timeline will help unfold the stupidity of all the companies related to our phone line:

1991: My father leaves and my parents get divorced. Our long distance account is in his name.

2002: They realize that he doesn't live here anymore and decide rather than change the name of the account to my mother, who has been sending them checks with her name on them for the last 11 years, they just completely shut off our long distance service without any notice.

Brilliant. We love making a rather important long distance call and not being able to get through because of their stupidity. Of course, it had to be on Sunday, when no one is around to help. The phone company gave us a list of a ton of long distance carriers, but on a Sunday, which of them will be available?

2. We've had our phone service cut off about 3-4 times during the day while they worked on the phone lines down our street. How hard is it to maintain a residential area's phone lines? Do they always have to be repairing the station around the corner with all the phone lines of the neighborhood in it?

3. One time they must've rerouted my grandmother's phone line, because someone new was moving into an apartment a couple of buildings away from her, and all calls to her number went there. I'm still baffled by this one.

4. The worst one was when our phone line went completely dead in a bizarre way. Instead of getting a dial tone, all we got was faint static, and the higher in the house, the fainter the static. It sounded like a Geiger counter. I went across the street to the pay phone to call the phone company about it, and after half an hour getting through the automated service (with about 6 options related to billing, all before actual line repairs) and another hour on hold, the best they could do was tell us that they tested our phone line and it came up "inconclusive". WTF "inconclusive" meant was beyond any of us. Dialing our house just got busy signals. It took them about 3-4 days to fix it.
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As of now, we still have no long distance (doesn't matter anymore, we just E-mail everything anyways now), but now we have a major problem with my grandmother's bills.

A couple of years ago, for some reason, they changed the rate for her long distance calls, and her one minute calls to Champaign (leaving a message for my uncle most of those times) went from about 15 to 20 cents to over 4 DOLLARS (2000% increase! :eek: ). Of course, she didn't even read her bills, and just wrote them the $50 check every month (which should be suspicious in the first place, who the hell pays $50 a month for a phone bill?). None of us knew about it until she moved a few months ago and we transferred her account and saw her payments, and of course neither company (AT&T was her long distance carrier, who billed her through her local carrier, Ameritech) said they were the ones doing it (it was always the other company, of course), so we have basically told her not to pay any phone bills whatsoever until this is cleared up. We also took off the option of having AT&T bill Ameritech and just bill her directly so they're separate now. Lately, she hasn't been geting bills from AT&T, and I would like to see if they figured out they made the mistake and are now giving her credit, or if she just hasn't gotten any bills. Of course, the only person who's not busy during regular business hours is my grandmother and she's more helpless than a 5 year old with this, so we've gotta find some way to get her balance (maybe I can get it Monday, I'll be off, who knows) and see just what the hell they're doing. If it's still bad, we're gonna have to get the citizen's utility board or something to investigate this, we just don't have the time to be sorting through phone bills for the last 2 years.
 
Yes indeed, get someone to look into this. And, ALWAYS MAKE SURE what rateplan you're on!! I can't stress this enough. Also remember that it is a crime for any phone company to bill you for calls more than 180 days old. Good luck, and don't blame all phone companies will you? Or switch to something smaller.
 
Get a cellphone, these days some companies makes it cheaper to have a cell phone than a residential line.
 
Luis G said:
Get a cellphone, these days some companies makes it cheaper to have a cell phone than a residential line.
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No. Cell phones always have air time. On a fixed line I can call to my heart's content. A local call is free, and long distance between 5 to 8 cents a minute. If you get the right carrier, you can get $20 for unlimited long distance (AT&T offer this, provided you call other AT&T customers). Cell phones are just sickly expensive compared to land lines if you use your phone on a regular basis.
 
Well, in here they charge you per local call, so gives the same, and there are no unlimited long distance plans.

Mexico: cell phone (unefon) cheaper than land line.
 
Over here we have Pay-as-you-go cell phones. No line rental, just pre-pay your calls and the more you spend per month the less they are (T-Mobile) - Starts at 30p/min and goes down to 10p/min.
 
AT&T just called me to try and convince me to switch to them ... I tell them all my long distance calls are made on my cell so they can just not bother with me anymore!!

Well, the most dumb thing a phone company did to me personally was that they wouldn't take my uncle's name off the account after he passed away ... they wanted to see him in person :rolleyes:
 
Aunty Em said:
Over here we have Pay-as-you-go cell phones. No line rental, just pre-pay your calls and the more you spend per month the less they are (T-Mobile) - Starts at 30p/min and goes down to 10p/min.
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The line rental refers to land lines... 10p a minute, for a land line here, is a robbery. Thats over 20 Canadian cents a minute. Even my parent's cell phone is cheaper than that... :/ 30p = over 60 Canadian cents. That is twice as expensive as making a long distance call to South Africa. Nah, I will stick with land lines. 4 cent (US) a minute to the UK and 5 cent (US) a minute to continental Europe if you take the international package. :)
 
LastLegionary said:
Aunty Em said:
Over here we have Pay-as-you-go cell phones. No line rental, just pre-pay your calls and the more you spend per month the less they are (T-Mobile) - Starts at 30p/min and goes down to 10p/min.
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The line rental refers to land lines... 10p a minute, for a land line here, is a robbery. Thats over 20 Canadian cents a minute. Even my parent's cell phone is cheaper than that... :/ 30p = over 60 Canadian cents. That is twice as expensive as making a long distance call to South Africa. Nah, I will stick with land lines. 4 cent (US) a minute to the UK and 5 cent (US) a minute to continental Europe if you take the international package. :)
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True, the charges are outrageous, but as a backup in case the landline is out it's worth it since if my daughter was ill in the middle of the night I can't leave her to go to the payphone 3 streets away. And to top it all BT are said to be getting rid of about 5000 public phoneboxes over the next year or so.
 
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