I feel like I've been sucked over to the dark side.
I've had a cellular phone with AT&T Wireless Services for 7 or 8 years.
Our small company was buying its minutes through a minutes reseller
(Comprehensive Solutions, Inc., formerly of Oregon City, Oregon, now
apparently in Aloha). That resulted in a reasonably low monthly cost,
but the extra layer of
non-responsive bureaucracy meant that, for instance, I couldn't transfer
my phone number to another carrier. This was not helped by CSI's
apparent corporate policy of not answering the phone, responding to
answering machine messages, nor replying to e-mail.
Meanwhile, my wife also had an AT&T Wireless Services cell phone on
a "family" plan with her monther and our daughter. We've wanted to
transfer my phone to the "family plan", but couldn't get the reseller to
respond.
Thanks to a major screw-up on the part of the reseller, I was finally
forced to take some action in February. All I wanted to do was buy a new
phone and add it to my wife's plan. Turns out that is impossible. All
of our phones were CDMA, and you can't buy a CDMA phone today. Further,
you can't add a GSM phone to a CDMA phone plan. That means, for me to
get a phone, we have to replace the three other phones in the plan.
FURTHER, to stay with AT&T, we would give up any right to the phone
hardware subsidies that make the phones affordable. Strangely, however,
if we transferred to Cingular, we COULD get the phone subsidies, even
though AT&T and Cingular are now the same company.
So, that's what we did. We transferred from the comfort of AT&T to
the unknown land of Cingular, with 4 new phones. During the sign-up
period, the representative at Good Guys told us there was a promotional
offer for two free months of their "Roadside Assistance" coverage, which
would start costing $3 a month in the third month. I didn't want that,
but he said there was NO WAY FOR THE RETAILER TO DISABLE IT. That's a
bad sign.
We've had the phones for a month now, so I decided to go to their website
and cancel the roadside assistance. Here, I find one of the most annoying
things you can find on a commercial website: they have a brightly-lit
website where you can ADD services, but there is absolutely no spot for
REMOVING services. You have to call their customer service number.
That is incredibly irritating. You can almost hear the marketing grunts
in their meeting: "if we make it hard for people to remove services,
maybe they'll probably just give up and we can keep on taking their money!"
That kind of thinking implies that I am too st00pid to figure out how to
use the telephone.
Get a clue, Cingular. If you are going to allow me to manage my account
online, then you need to allow me to MANAGE my account online. There's
no way I'm going to experiment with new services if there is no easy way
for me to remove them later.
