I’m a 3%-er! or, Suck it AT&T
Let me start by saying I’ve been with AT&T for about 6 years. My wife has been for 12. I never had a problem with them, their tech support has always been helpful(surprisingly) even if it took 2-3 calls to get resolution.
Tonight, I really took notice to a commercial of theirs I usually ignored. My favorite part of this commercial was this screen towards the end:
“AT&T covers 97% of all Americans.” What they don’t include is, “And if you’re a customer of ours in the 3%, you’re screwed, man.”
Dating back to late March/early April of this year, my wife and I experience extremely frequent dropped calls. You can nearly count on a call dropping between the 3-5 minute mark. Everytime. My wife carried on a 20 minute conversation with her sister by way of 6 phone calls. Possibly more irritatingly is the fact that often my phone will never ring, but instead I’ll get phantom voicemail messages left by people I never received a call from. My wife often has people call me looking for her because her phone will head straight to voicemail with full signal sitting 2 feet away from me.
The first time I called AT&T to complain about the issues, they were very apologetic and I genuinely thought they cared and would address my issue. They said there was a problem with the tower nearest our home address, and to give them a week to fix the issue. I was satisfied to give them this week and waited to hear back from them. I didn’t. I called them again to be told the issue was fixed.
Now, mind you, I don’t use my phone excessively at home. I use it a lot, but rarely when I’m at home. My wife does the same. I assumed the issue really was fixed, until one Saturday I was making several business related calls. I don’t think I need to tell you how unprofessional it is to call someone 4 times to talk for 15 minutes and explain how sorry you are that your phone keeps dropping your ca- DAMN IT, dial again. I missed a call about a job a couple of weeks ago, and just found out about it tonight. Guess what? POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED.
This is an on-going issue. I call AT&T on average once a week/two weeks because we experience excessive dropped calls. Last week, I called because my phone dropped with my insurance agent 4 times over a 10 minute span. I was told the issue I’d previously been told was fixed hadn’t been. I was told the issue that popped up in April was still around, despite 4-5 previous assurances that it had been resolved.
So yesterday, while my wife was on the phone with our insurance agent regarding this hellish situation we’ve been going through with our air conditioner, she was forced to call them 4 times in 20 minutes. This was the last straw. I called AT&T to complain again.
My phone dropped the call literally 10+ times in the 60 total minutes I spent talking to people who clearly could not have given less a shit about my constant lack of service. While I was on the phone with AT&T one of the previous techs I was speaking to had called me back- my phone did not ring, instead I just received a voicemail notification while I was talking to the new person. Finally I insisted I wanted our contract dissolved and would not be paying an early termination fee. I was informed we would be billed for it anyway, and that if I chose not to pay it, I could deal with those repercussions. They instead insisted I get new SIM cards for both phones, as that could be the issue I’m experiencing.
Now that I have these new SIMs in our phones, we are still missing phantom calls, still losing calls- where do we go from here? Help me, internets, you’re my only hope. How to I get out of his hellish, worthless contract that’s failing to fulfill the services they’re contracted to provide?
