January 2006, we bought our third Saturn, this time an Ion. We've had lots of luck with Saturn. Good price, good trade-in on my ten-year-old Saturn wagon (which we'd kept in absolutely perfect condition). Everybody was friendly enough. And then it came time to pick it up. It had all been pre-arranged. SO I took an afternoon off, and up we drove with our old Saturn to the dealership in Elmhurst, IL. And then we f___g sat. For a couple of hours. It seems that anybody who's bought a car there can bring it by any old time for a free car wash. And these guys get precedence over everybody. They had to give our new car a once over, but it had to wait for all the damn car washes. I finally said, what the hell. By the time we got the damn car, our little ones were quite hungry, WE were quite hungry, and we got stuck in frigging rush hour traffic. When we got a survey in the mail about our new purchase, our only comments were on the horrendous pickup experience. In October 2007, almost TWO YEARS LATER, they sent a reply expressing their regrets.

Recently, while on a news site (NEWS, not PORN, not something STUPID), I ended up with a popup window from ringtonemecca.com. These people sucks big donkey wangs. You literally cannot shut down their popup, because it pops up yet another popup, asking "Are you sure you wanna shut us down?" Yes, dickheads, I do. So by making me kill ALL my browser windows, I'm going to change my mind? Never in a million years would I buy anything from these shitheads.

In large part, I blame the gadget geeks who are dumb enough to shell out hundreds of dollars for this stupid thing. If you really, really need a phone that takes pictures, plays videos and movies, and does all the other shit the iPhone does, then your life is pathetic. You are a dumb asshole.

That said, as usual, the first (and likely second) iteration of a new gizmo will suck. To start, the battery on the iPhone is literally soldered in there. If you have a problem with it, you can't swap it out on your own. You can pay Apple $29 for a loaner phone while you send your iPhone in for repairs. The battery replacment costs $79, plus $7 shipping.

It ain't easy getting the damn thing activated. It supports a limited number of applications. For what it costs, it should launch the frigging space shuttle.You essentially have to configure the browser for every other web page.

You can't hear any streaming content. It won't play flash. No calendar synch. No video camera. 

Good luck if you're a business user, as it won't synch up with current corporate email systems. No expansion slots.

Okay, this gets even better. Steven Jobs announces the iPhone is too expensive. So he drops the price $200. So now all the idiots who've already bought one scream bloody murder. He decides he'll do at least partial rebates. "I paid too much for this phone!" one dumb asshole said on TV, after finding out about the price drop. Yeah, shithead, you did. Whose fault is that?

And it gets better YET. People started suing Apple, saying that the price drop kept them from reselling their iPhones at a profit. Well, they didn't sell it to you so you could turn right around and SELL it, shithead. And there are no guarantees to anybody about the resale of a damn thing.

Occasionally, when having severe gas pains, we'll actually as a family shop at Wal-Mart. And every time we do, it feels like we're looking at both ends of the evolutionary chart at the same time. 

It's the same unwashed masses who fly Southwest Airlines: dolts and dullards. The first clue is the plethora of carts in the parking lots. The dumbshits who shop at Wal-Mart leave their carts anywhere they feel like, because they're shiftless, lazy rednecks.

But the REAL scam here is the hired help. On TV, Wal-Mart employees are helpful, friendly, knowledgeable. In real life, they're as lifeless and uncaring as the average customer service representative. How do you attract good-natured, willing, and wonderful people when you pay them SHIT? The answer is, you don't. 

The next clue is the greeter. Sometimes you get a friendly hello, but most often you get a zombie who wordlessly, unsmilingly hands you a flyer when you enter. I don't normally expect a store to HAVE a greeter, but if you're going to bother, then get one who GREETS.

I've seen THIS one in Target and KMart as well: employees so intent on gabbing in the aisles that they won't even move their fat asses when customers are trying to pass by. On a recent excursion to Wal-Mart, we had to literally squeeze by the blue-vested ladies after twice saying "excuse me" to no avail.

Their system of a revolving column holding the plastic bags at the checkout is a mess. On one occasion, after having my bags handed to me, I pointed out the one bag still hanging there with some of my merchandise. And last summer, as the Hindu gentleman ringing me up stuffed my stuff into a bag, he came upon a bag still hanging there with junk that the previous customer had paid for. Too late, long gone, and without all his purchases. I've seen that once more since then, although one time we caught the lady before she exited the store. NOW .... that's three times I've personally seen that happen, and I'm barely IN the damn place. So how often does it REALLY happen?

Today, April 4, 2007, my wife was checking out at hte Wal-Mart when the cashier dropped the eggs belonging to the customer currently at the register. The cashier appeared clueless as to what to do. My wife offered to grab another dozen eggs for them, if they kept her place in line. When she returned, she got a very half-assed "thanks" from the cashier, and nothing from the customer. 

Customer service is a thing of the past. But Wal-Mart advertises in such a way that's supposed to make you think it's NOT. Sorry, not buying it.

After a decade and a half with the same washer, da wife and I finally had to get a new one. What better brand to get than a Maytag? They're famous. So we did. 

Three years later, after the warranty was dead, so was the new washer. The repair guy said to not spend the money with him fixing it, because it needed a whole new transmission. He said invest in yet another new one. So we went to Sears for another. 

So, dummies that we are, we got another Maytag, in January. Within two weeks, it developed a leak. We'd bought it through Sears. We had to wait almost two weeks to get service, from a company called A&E. Guy came out, fixed it. Two days later, it leaked again. Had to wait over another week. This guy replaced different parts, said the first guy didn't know what he was doing. How reassuring. 

Meanwhile, I looked up the model online. Found numerous references to it being a LEMON. A Maytag.

Then we had a third leak. The next guy out, after a week and a half, he said neither of the first two guys knew what they were doing. He ordered THREE different parts. He was suppsoed to expedite them, but didn't do that, apparently. We went almost two weeks without a washer at all. He finally came back, and everything was dandy. For a week.

On a Sunday morning, it started leaking a fourth time, only this time it was a gusher. Water literally pouring out the bottom. That's it. We invoked the lemon law with Sears, and they said come on by. Get a Kenmore, they said. Better name. SO we got a Kenmore. Guys showed up, hooked it up, da wife did the first load, and it f_____g leaked. 

Called again, screamed bloody f____g murder. Waited almost a week. Guy came, opened it up, said "here's the problem, they didn't put this one clamp on correctly," and sure enough, he got it unleaky. For now.

He also told us that Maytags have terrible maintenance issues and lots of recalls. He ALSO said that if you see a Maytag truck, it's actually a Sears truck, because Maytag doesn't wanna deal with it anymore. So from our perspective, the only Maytag repairman is the one on TV, and the reason he's lonely is because his shit company has farmed out their service to third parties.

Holy shit, you can't make this stuff up. By June, the replacement for the replacement went bad. The circuit boards blew up. They said they'd need five days for the parts to show, and only THEN could they diagnose the problem. Then it could be another two weeks. I called Sears and screamed bloody f_____g murder. I demanded a new washer, instantaneously. That night, I got it. Un-freaking-believable.

For years, Coors kept up a mystique by making it available only in Colorado. All sorts of idiots would drive out there and fill up their trunks with the stuff. The real secret the Coors folks were keeping was the fact that the stuff SUCKS. It's like water. Which is why it's such a joke to put out a LIGHT version. Water's not good enough, so you gotta also sell DEHYDRATED water?

Many years ago, a friend of the family returned from out west with several cases of Coors, all excited. My dad tried it, and said, "You went all the way out there for THAT?"

The Coors Light commercials with the old football coaches dubbed in are annoying as hell. The actors are paid to be arrogant dickheads talking about how wonderful this shit beer is. They're embarrassing.

I found it quite amusing that they can't even sell this crap in another country where they may not know about it. While I was in London, I found a pub where they were stuck with their Coors supply.

Yeah, I'm a beer snob. But there ARE good domestic brands. Coors happens not to be one of them. And their commercials suck.

Sprint for a new provider

August 2006: I was heading over to the UK, and had been happily using a Sprint phone for years. But it wasn't going to work in London. I figured I'd stay with Sprint, and simply upgrade. I looked up the Sprint 800 number, and tracked down the Sprint retail stores closest to me. I didn't have time to order online, because the trip had come up rather suddenly. I needed to walk in some place, get a phone, and walk out with it. The 800 number provided the numbers for the individual stores. Nobody answers them; you talk to a computer. There is NO option to opt out and speak to an actual person. None. I figured it would be good to talk to somebody, tell them what I needed, and determine if they could help me. But couldn't do it. Well, I figured I'd take my chances.

So I drove to the closest one, so I thought. Since I couldn't talk to anybody at the store about locating them, I fed the address into Mapquest, and it gave me bad directions. It had me doing a u-turn I didn't need to make, as it turns out. I drove around in circles, and finally found the place, on 75th Street in Downers Grove, IL. They promptly informed me that I'd have to buy their SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLAR PHONE if I wanted to use it in the UK. That's nuts, I told them, my boss spent less than a hundred on a phone that worked over there. And I'd found a number of Sprint models online that would work there, and for far less than seven hundred. NOPE, they said, seven hundred. My only option. Screw that, I said. I had wasted an hour and a half tracking them down, finding them, and finding out they were worthless to me.

I looked up a Cingular store, told them OVER THE PHONE what I needed, and they said to come on in. Twenty-five minutes after I walked in, I had a $110 GMS phone (not including the $50 rebate!) that would work in the UK. And it worked beautifully. After seven years as a Sprint customer, I dumped the assholes because their stores' automated menus suck, their retail outlet personnel don't know what they're doing, and their outlets can't sell you a competitive product.

The only dumbshit thing about the Motorola phone they sold me to run their service is that the ear portion of the Motorola earpiece is so large, it WON'T FIT IN A HUMAN EAR. Apparently they think this thing will only be used by hound dogs.
 
 

Customer Service Scumbags

The bogus thing about McDonalds's, Burger King, Wal-Mart, and every other outfit advertising their friendly customer service is that they're full of shit. Wal-Mart commercials make it look like everybody who works there is Mother Teresa. But other than the guy in the wheelchair who greets you as you walk in, the rest of them are no better (and no worse) than any other place. 

And you will never find lazier, less considerate, less caring individuals than those who toil for pennies at a Mac's. If you pay those people jack shit, they will perform like you pay them jack shit. And so they do. They barely make eye contact. BTW, the worst Mac's I've ever been in, with regards to service, are the ones in the United terminal at O'Hare airport, and the one right outside the Detroit airport. Disgusting places, filthy surfaces, and inconsiderate help.

Y'know what killed the Checkers franchises (at least by where I live)? Lousy service. I stopped going to the one by my house because they forever loused up my order. Whenever I got my bag o' stuff, I instantly had to go off to the side to make sure I got what I asked for. May 2005, I hit the Taco Bell at 75th and Cass in Woodridge IL, and end up with the wrong order. Idiots.

Bullshit advertising

These SUV manufacturers constantly promote a ridiculous notion: that you're going to take your vehicle off-roading. But it won't happen. If you pay that much for a vehicle, you sure as hell ain't gonna bounce it over rough terrain, rip up the paint job, risk the suspension, and take a chance of getting stuck someplace. You might do that with a cheap jeep, but you sure as hell won't do that with a $30,000 family vehicle.

Marriott, Schmarriott      August 2002

I have been a loyal Marriott customer, I'm a Silver Elite member, I love their hotels.  BUT ..... their reservations setup can be frigging AWFUL.  When you want to trade in points, you call one number, but those people have no access to your account balance.  So you have to call a different number, order a particular award code, and the CODES are arcane.  So you get your point total (you can't trust your statement because it's always out of date), then you call back the reservations people, who then will transfer you to the rewards people.  That turns out to be an automated service with garbled recordings.  So you hold the line until a real person shows up anyway, and then THOSE people can't even look at the info the reservations people punched in for you.   It's a mess of a system, for an otherwise good outfit.
 
 

This should have been terribly obvious    July 2002

Crate and Barrel is advertising a Stars and Stripes welcome mat.  Your visitors can show up at your door and wipe their feet on the flag.
 
 

Your tax dollars (not) at work

A relative called me and asked if I could help him file his 2001 tax returns electronically.  No sweat, I said, so I started doing homework on www.irs.gov.  It is filled with Q&A stuff.  Can I file electronically?  Yes.  How?  Fill out an electronic form.  Where is the form?  It's hinted that you can do it right there online, but they don't clearly spell out, you really do have to buy a package or use an online service.  Their site is thoroughly confusing in that regard.  I called the 800 number for the IRS, and it gave me several automated options.  I followed the options for questions on electronic filing, and finally dead-ended at a menu where NONE of the options was appropriate.  NONE of them had to do with electronic filing.  So I waited, and hit random buttons, and finally snagged an operator.  He barely spoke English.  No kidding, virtually no English.  It was obvious he couldn't answer a single question.  He had no idea what electronic filing was, so all he could do was ask me, "What closest big city you gots?"  Chicago, I tell him.  He said, "Here, you go, is on Dearborn, I give address, you go."  Thanks for nothing.  I call again a little while later to try again, ended up with another half-immigrant, and talked into giving me another person who not only spoke English but confirmed for me, "The e-file site is a joke, it's too vague, it answers a lot of questions, but none that really help."

I called again a couple of days later, to ask about the 2001 tax rebate.  They keep changing the automated menu options. I followed the options to ask questions about the damn rebate, but the menus all keep taking you to deadends.  A few days earlier, I could get answers to generic questions.  This time, I had to have social security numbers, numbers of dependents, all sorts of horseshit.   I FINALLY got a f____g person, who said he'd transfer me to the right place.  Seconds later, I got a "your call canot be completed as dialed" message.  I was SCREAMING.  I called back again, finally coaxed their system into giving me a person again, which is REALLY F____G HARD TO DO, and told him, "I need an answer, and I need to get transferred without getting cut off again."   Finally I got my answer, 25 minutes after I started.  These guys SUCK BIG-TIME. 
 

If you weren't automated, I'd strangle you Jan 2002

We tried out three magazines for 90 days, through Fleet Bank credit card.  After 90 days, we decided to cancel, using the 800 number provided on our statement.  Turned out to be a voice-recognition thingy.  It let us cancel two of the mags, after extreme repetition, but refused to cancel the third.  My wife was ready to kill.  I tried it as well.  Being that we're both accent-free Midwesterners, I gave us the benefit of the doubt.  No option to kick to an operator.  Talk to the computer, the end.

So I called Fleet.  They said it's simple,  we'll send you a form, you fill it out and dispute the charge, and it's done.  So three days later we get the form, fill it out, mail it in.  Fleet sends back a reply saying, contact the vendor.  Excuse me, you dumb assholes, I tried that already.  I call back Fleet, talk to a lovely-sounding young lady who puts me on hold, says she's talked to her supervisor, and they've cancelled it. THANK YOU.

A month later, our Fleet statement arrives, showing the charge for the uncancelled magazine, plus a $3 late charge.  I call Fleet again, screaming bloody murder.  THIS TIME, an operator tells me they can't cancel things for us (despite what I was told the previous time), and by the way, here's the 800 number to speak to a person at the magazine joint.   This I do.  They tell me 7-10 business days, it's a done deal.  The second the magazine charge was off the statement, WE CANCELLED THE FLEET CARD.

Chicago Auto Show, 2001.  They're showing off cars with Internet access built in.  They even have steering wheels with little points of interest, like map lookups, right there on the wheel.  Summer 2002, there's a Chicago Tribune article about athletes and rap stars who buy cars with TVs built into the steering.  So I imagine the first time somebody crashes because they're distracted while downloading porn or watching reruns, just watch somebody sue the shit out of the carmaker.
 
 

Seriously, it's in there somewhere         Sept 2000

In the western suburbs of Chicago, a chain called Liberty Suburban Chicago Newspapers bought up several local town papers.  In the first issue after the buyout, the editors highlighted some changes they wanted readers to be aware of.  They'd changed the format, they'd eliminated a popular call-in opinion page, and they got rid of all local news.  The paper is now largely the same for all the suburbs, and is regularly filled with, well, filler.  It's stuff that all newspapers have lying around, stuff that would be relevant now or six months from now, such as gardening tips or little historical profiles.  All they are is window dressing for ads and coupons anyway.  The next issue had a filler bit promoting Scientology, a dangerous goofy cult religion.  The next issue actually featured a couple of local photos.  But the local news consisted solely of a profile of a local man who belonged to an iris-planting club.  Oh gee.  Well, they weren't kidding when they promised to eliminate from the local paper all local news.

2003 update: They got bought yet again, and turned the newspaper into a real newspaper, sort of. Local news (although on one occasion an innocuous bit about some kid's school project took front page while the town's first murder in twenty years got buried on page 6). All's well that ends well.

An Apple a day
         keeps 95% of all software away

Apple's snazzy-looking 450mHz Cube with a 15-inch monitor costs around $2500.   Strike one.  It likes to go to sleep a lot, especially when left on for more than a day.  With broadband connections, this is increasingly common.  Strike two.  To reach the extra ports on the Cube's underbelly, you have to pick it up and flip it over.  This makes it incredibly easy to hit the power button by mistake and shut it off.  Strike three.  Face it, the Cube is an overly expensive toy for people who want to exclude themselves from the vast majority of the software written for the PC market.
 

Some forevers are longer than others   July 2000

TOYSMART.COM, which sold a 60 percent stake to Disney in 1999, finally tanked.  Disney says it gave Toysmart every opportunity, while the Toysmart folk say that Disney let them twist in the wind.  Regardless, visitors to Toysmart.COM have been told from the beginning that their personal data left behind was eternally safe from predators. But as Toysmart begins its tailspin, they are attempting to grab some cash by selling their customer database.  So much for truth in advertising.   The Federal Trade Commission filed a motion to stop the sale.
 

Darn this new-fangled technology June 27, 2000

Da wife receives a mailing from Nordstrom's.  Finds some capri pants.  My wife actually looks good in them, unlike the scores of cattle out there who don't realize, if you don't have the legs and the butt for them, skip it.  She calls their 800 number, and the automated ninny informs her  the average wait is 26 minutes.  Ah, but wait, the mailing directs you to their web site.  As with the mint offering (see next item), we have a catalog number.  So off we go to www.nordstroms.com.  It even has a place you can enter the catalog number, go right to that item.  Oops, but when we enter it, it doesn't find it.  So we do the keyword search.  Nope, can't find it.  You can find generic stretch or capri pants, but not the flowery ones in the mailing, the ones my wife wants, the ones we have the catalog number for.  Doesn't get any more specific than that, having an inventory item number.  Nice site, guys.

Newly-minted stupidity June 11 00

Da wife receives a mailing from the US Mint.  Order this, order that.  ORDER OVER THE WEB, from www.usmint.gov, and we'll waive the handling fee.  Great.  The proof sets in the mailing are just what she wants.  The mailing even provides their catalog numbers.  So we visit www.usmint.gov, and can't find the items.  Can't find them by keyword search, not by price search, not by the catalog number.  In fact, if you HAVE a catalog number for an item, you can't search on that either.  Period.  The catalog numbers appear on the pages IF YOU FIND WHAT YOU WANT, but you can't search by them.  Thanks for nothing, guys.

Hardware Headaches 

Don R. from the north coast of the USA sent me this one:         11 June 00
 

You want me to what?

"I bought a brand new computer from a computer store in Calgary Alberta Canada. After about a month of owning this $2,500.00 toy, it starts to give me problems. Files disappearing then re-appearing magically, systems errors when you are playing games, all sorts of fatal errors, which to a new guy scared the hell out of me cause I thought it meant that it was gonna terminate itself. For the next few months I took my investment back and forth to the computer store I bought it from. Eight times to be exact. And each time they would take it, keep it for about 2-3 weeks, give it back to me, swear that it was fixed. A week later I'm back to square one. 

"On the eight time, when I phoned the company, they accused me of doing something to it to make it screw up all the time. I have never yelled at anyone on the phone in my life. I came unglued in front of my wife and kids and tore the salesman a new one. Then I drove down to the computer store to talk to him in person. Now here comes the good part.This is a brand new computer and the idiot salesman tells me that to correct  my problem, I should buy a new hard drive. I'm sorry I tell him, but isn't that what the god damn warranty is for? He says yes, but when you buy a new computer, if you have any problems with the hard drive they send it back to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then sends you a re-manufactured one back. So you don't get your new hard drive back. You get someone else's frigging piece of crap back. 

"By this time my wife is trying to tell me to calm down cause I've turned red in the face. So now you want me to buy a new hard drive for $300.00. I then asked him, what happens if the new hard drive screws up too? AND THEN HE  SAYS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE. I guess you would get back someone else's re-manufactured hard drive back. I decided, screw the warranty (they weren't really honoring it anyway) I took my computer to a computer shop in my hometown here.  He worked on it for 1 1/2 hours and solved all the problems. Cost my over $100.00 but now my blood pressures back to normal. I guess thats what happens when you buy a computer from a company with the words Payless Computers in it."
 

Foliage Fools

Commonwealth Edison, electric company for the Chicago metro area, decides to clear trees and vines along one of their electric line routes, including the one behind my house.  They leave tall trees and a huge bush growing right into the line, but chop down my six foot tall lilac bush, which is several feet and ten years away from the same line.  I scream bloody murder.  Crew chief gives me a card, tells me it was a tree.  I disagree, and tell him, next time bring a f______g botanist with you.
 

Seriously, we don't want the business

Not exactly what I'd  call silly

Coming soon : Crackwhore Barbie

Yo Mama, Inc.

Telephony baloney

The big thing in advertising now is selling stuff you don't have.  Check out commercials from Sprint, or one of the other telco companies.  They show people going online with little handheld devices, looking up the weather and employing umbrellas just before it rains.  Qwest has a series of commercials in which users can get "any movie ever made, in any language, any time."  Wow, can they do that?  Hell NO.  But they imply that they're on the cutting edge, and it's a matter of time.  Well, y'know, they're still a long way off.

Cingular, formerly the shithole known as Cellular One, advertises in such a way that they insinuate they're somehow helping you maintain your individuality, they are protecting your right to say what you want.  Actually, they're just a frigging cell phone company.  What are they doing differently from everyone else?  Advertising with cute little stick people.  Otherwise, they're just a cell phone company. 

As far as advertising text messaging as a cute way for young people to communicate ..... ever had to type text messages with a numeric keypad?  You get twelve keys.  It can take four or five keystrokes to type a single character.  When it was pointed out to Cingular and the other vendors that this is a ridiculous way to talk, they all started advertising the cute aspects to shorthand.  Forget it.
 

Hey, Mom, everybody else is making a phone, can I make one too?

Winter 2001: My excellent VTech 900MHZ cordless phone that cost $200 a couple of years ago, the one with the interchangeable batteries and incredible range, is finally going to heck.  Can't push the buttons any more.  I want to get two things: a wall phone with a mute, so I can keep a call going while I swap batteries on the cordless  but mute all the noise that comes with this swap; and another cordless, as I gradually get rid of the other one.  Da wife gets me a Bellsouth wall phone with a mute.  But you have to hold the mute button down to mute it.  They couldn't make a toggle out of it. So if you want to do anything else while muting, you get to use only one hand.  Why bother?  It's a useless piece of junk.

Betting on a brand name, I get a General Electric for a cordless.  Endless static.  People would complain on conference calls, who's making all the noise?  The speaker phone had practically no volume.  So you had to hover over it to hear anyway, rendering that feature useless.  Finally, the idiots who designed it fixed it so when you press the numbers, it doesn't beep back at you for two seconds.  So if like me, you can punch in a phone number with area code in less than six seconds, the delay in response totally throws you off.  PLUS I can hit the buttons faster than it can keep up, with the result being that it often loses numbers while I'm pushing.  Back to the store it goes.  I replaced it with a Uniden, which so far is excellent in every respect.

Everybody got into the cordless phone market, accounting for the massive drop in prices.  However, the GE phone acted more likea bad walkie-talkie than a phone.  If you're not going to do it right, don't bother.  Brand name, indeed.
 
 

AT&T  stands for All Thumbs & Tinheads

My experience with AT&T over the years has sucked monkey balls. I can scarcely begin to describe my loathing for  them. Check it out.

July 2007: My Cingular wireless account, goddamn, turned into an AT&T account because of a merger. To get the best rate for wife and child (my oldest now being in high school), I went back tot he Cingular store. Got whatever package sounded right. Got two rebates. They showed up in the form of AT&T / Visa debit cards. What do you need with a debit card? A pin number, which AT&T doesn't provide. So you can't USE it as a debit card, only as a credit card. But since it's got a set amount on it, you can only use it when the amount is equal to or greater to the balance left on the card. It's a big f@cking scam, since how do you finally drain a balance of, let's say, a couple of bucks, or even just some change? You don't, so AT&T keeps the balance. These guys are complete assholes.

May 2007: These guys SUCK.  They SUCK. They SUCK. They SUCK, very BADLY. Jesus H. Christ, I can't tell you how badly AT&T sucks. My mom and dad have been on dial-up access for a couple of years. I finally convinced them to upgrade to high-speed. If you try to look up a f____g sales number online, you will be shit out of luck. I looked up all sorts of damn numbers. Some of them say they're for sales, but when I call them, I got tech support. At one point, I found a link for ordering high-speed access (DSL), but then it took me to a damn ordering page, where I could add DSL to my f___G shopping cart. BULLSHIT. Where's the damn phone number? They make it so goddamn hard to do business with them. Because they SUCK. They suck MONKEY BALLS.

February-March 2007: These complete dumb asshole f___kheads can't get a goddamn thing right. They keep breaking things on me. They change my plan without notifying me. They can never fix what they break. There's been so much crap with them lately, I'm providing a timeline.

• I've always been unlisted. But these shitheads at AT&T keep breaking it. I published a letter in the Chicago Tribune, and suddenly I got a bunch of calls from strangers congratulating me. Yeah, they were all positive calls, but they were folks who shouldn't have had my number. I called AT&T, said what the hell, and got unlisted again, last summer.
• Earlier this month, somebody called information and GOT MY GODDAMN NUMBER AGAIN. I called AT&T, said what the hell, AGAIN. I got the whole long-winded explanation of their merger with SBC. I don't give a shit, I told them, I'm supposed to be unlisted. Well, I ended up having to switch plans on both lines in the house because of their merger, and I had to fix Switchboard.com myself, to get off of there.
• Because of the merger, they told me my voice mail options were all going to change. All the buttons I was used to pushing for YEARS to hear, speed through, delete, save, whatever, my voice messages were all going to change. Had to perform setup on both phones for voice mail. This lasted two weeks, when they WENT BACK TO THE OLD BUTTONS.
• Two weeks later they TURNED OFF MY VOICE MAIL. I spent an hour with five different people at AT&T, going through all this shit. The first lady informed me that I'd been slammed, and some other carrier was now my local provider. She sent me to the slam operator, who informed me that I had NOT been slammed. She sent me to another guy, who promptly told me he couldn't help me, AND he tried to sell me their internet access, and I told him politely to stuff it. That guy sent me to yet ANOTHER guy, who SORTA fixed things.
• By the next day, my speed calling still wasn't working. I called AGAIN, and the lady in the repair department told me it looked like I HAD been slammed to another company. She had to make a bunch of calls to find out that I was indeed an AT&T customer. It turns out that the instructions on their web page that explain how speed calling is NOW supposed to work were WRONG. She didn't believe me, and I read her the instructions right off the web page.
• If it wasn't such a godawful hassle to swap companies, which I've done before, I would dump these stupid bastards in a heartbeat. They cost me HOURS and HOURS. Oh, and they switched me BACK to the OLD voice mail options, because that's how they're doing it now.

MARCH 2007: I finally get my first new bill with the "new" AT&T, and instead of going DOWN by $20-30, it went UP for $25. That required yet another phone call. They explained what the bill did NOT, which is that the bill reflected a month and a half of charges. What a bunch of shitheads.
APRIL 2007: Got my first bill that reflected ONLY a month under the new plan. It's $30 more than I was told to expect. These guys truly suck monkey balls.
 

June 2002: After a fierce storm, my cable went out, along with my broadband.  I dialed in through alternate means, visited their web site to get a phone number or update on repairs, but that's all hidden very well.  I checked my cable bill for a phone number, but AT&T doesn't have a central service number, since they've bought out all this mom and pop access joints, including mine. I dialed 411, and they had several numbers for them. I finally got the right one, and when I called it, the recorded voice informed me I shouldn't use that number, I should use the new one, and it went on and on about how great the new phone number was. Finally it gave me the new phone number, and it was the one I had dialed in the first place.

March 2001: AT&T finally sends somebody out to look at my broadband connection.  I end up with some weird guy who wants to tell me all about the weird games he plays on the Internet.  "Yeah, my girlfriend's not too happy about it, she'd rather I spent more time chewin' on her."  Yeah, like I need to know this, you flaky SOB. 

February 2001: Like an idiot, I signed up for AT&T @home, let them bring in a cable modem, and get me going on broadband.  They seem to be down more than up.  They left me some nice literature with a support phone number.  So when the cable modem service  went out again for the umpteenth time this month, I called that support number.  Their automated voice told me they have an outage in a bunch of states, including mine, but they couldn't give me any specifics, no estimated time of repair, and they can't even find my account in their database.  They said I must be in my local AT&T provider's database, whatever that means, so they gave me that number.  I called them, they said they had no reported outage of any kind, and they had no idea who I was talking to at the other number, they have no idea who those people are.  So I can't get any information, I can't get any kind of credit for being down yet again, I'm basically f_____d.   One more lovely little bit: when you call the support line, you MUST listen to the recorded voice for over a minute, while they try to sell you other services.  You can't hit any button to get around it.
    Jan 2002 update: AT&T dumped At-Home and now we've got their new domain for email.  It's mostly up.  Overall, the service has been good the last several months.  I even put in a firewall and hub for my own little secure network. 
 

December 2000: We're AT&T customers for long-distance, one of my cell phones, and cable.  Since May 2000, they've offered us a five-dollar-per-month cable discount, because of the long distance tie-in.  Every month, my wife calls and asks why the five dollars isn't reflected on the bill.  Every month, they tell her it's all taken care of, starting with the next month.  And every next month, still no discount.  I finally call, give them loads of shit, threaten to stink up their Oakbrook IL office, and they finally say they're giving us a "manual discount," for the entire year, all $60.  I'll believe it when it happens.

September 2000: Fully half the time, AT&T cell phones work like crap.  I call Ed, and instead of reaching him OR his voice mail, I get NOTHING.  Just dead air.  I call back a couple more times, it'll finally get me him or voice mail.  Then I want to check my own AT&T voice mail, so I dial myself, which is SOP, but more than fifty percent of the time,  instead of getting my own message where I can punch in my password, it asks me either, "Mailbox number please" or "Welcome to AT&T Wireless ...."  Huh?  How about giving me my messages, you dolts?

May 2000, our phone bill shows up, and our long-distance rate has gone up from ten cents a minute to twelve.  With many business calls, this has turned into a few bucks, plus, if they've goofed, maybe they'll goof again.  Da wife calls, gets the first idiot, they putz around on the phone trying to straighten it out, and then he pulls up our bill on his computer, and starts reconfiguring the bill, ONE CALL AT A TIME.  And we're talking about 120 long  distance business calls.  My wife says, part way through, "There must be a better way to do this."  He agrees, puts her on hold for fifteen minutes, then disconnects her. 

Da wife calls back, gets a woman, wife asks for supervisor, woman says "Your long distance rate went up.  We notified all customers by phone or mail."  Wife disagrees, says we received nothing.  Woman offers to put on rate specialist who will tell her the same thing, refuses request for supervisor.  By coincedence, two days earlier in the Chicago Tribune, there's an article about how AT&T gets their customers with rate hikes one way or the other, even when publicly discussing customer savings.  It even mentions how AT&T quietly raised rates.  We seriously considered MCI.
 

I've had two occasions to try the new AT&T 00 directory service.  Both times, after the operator found the correct firm for me, the automated number which subsequently came up was for the wrong place.  Who's the database administrator for this idiot service?
 

In fall of '99, da wife and I took a trip to Hawaii.  Before we went, I wanted to find out if my AT&T wireless phone would work there.  So I called customer service, punched in my phone number, and then of course the gal who answers asked for that number again ANYWAY, and I asked if my phone will work in Hawaii.  She asked me for the name and billing address of the account, as well as the last four digits of my social security number.  "Just to find out if the phone works in Hawaii?" I asked.  Yes, yes.  And THEN she had to put me on hold to research this.  WHY THE HELL she can't punch this info up on the computer, y'know, as in where my coverage is good for, I don't understand.
 

I  got one of these Ericcson phones to go with the AT&T One Rate. I'm in a conference room in Kansas City. My wife calls me. Lovely. But then I can't get enough of a signal to call her back from the exact same location five minutes later. I can't get a signal outside the building to call her. Half an hour later, I can get a signal outside. Then as we're leaving, I can't get the signal again. And yet I could make and get calls in Canada two days earlier. What the hell.

Activating my new Ericcson phone was a challenge to begin with. It arrives with a letter stating that the phone service is already activated. Well, wrong. I call, they tell me their system's down, I have to wait til it's back up at five, and by 8 PM I'll be in business. Well, sure enough I'm not. I call, have to call back two other times, end up talking to EIGHT different people, and sometime late that night I'm activated.
 
 

AT&T True Rewards. It's a service that came with a company calling card. If your party doesn't pick up within so many rings, the recorded voice says "They're not answering. Would you like to leave a message?" If you DO leave a message, you get very limited time to do it, and then it tries ringing them back for a while til they pick up, and it replays your message. WHAT CRAP. It locks you out of the voice mail for the party you're calling. It's not even an option. And who doesn't have voice mail now? True Rewards is an obstacle to leaving messages, not a facilitator. In late '97 I had True Rewards fixed, so that if it kicked in, it kicked right out again if my party's voice mail answered. Then it broke, so that it took over again. I had it fixed again, and after a year it broke again. Thank Ja I left that company and dumped the card.

So I'm in the Marshall Fields building on State Street in Chicago, and Ed pages me. Cels don't work well in the basement cafe, so I hit the pay phone and pull out my MCI calling card. For whatever reason, my PIN is no longer valid. An operator picks up, says she'll send me to customer service. The next message says "Your call cannot be completed as dialed, please hang up and try again." Disconnect. So I call again. I get the operator. "Here's customer service." Disconnect. I call again. I explain I'm not going through this again. She gives ME the number to dial. The automated male voice sloooooooooowly walks me through the options. The first two don't apply; fixing PINs is lumped into OTHER. Guy comes back on, pitches some products, and tells me I may be randomly surveyed to insure customer satisfaction. I say, "If anybody's listening, this whole thing stinks." Ten minutes later, no further along than when I started, I hang up. I have cancelled my MCI calling card.
 

Because I'm a masochist, I have AT&T Wireless service.  When you call customer service, the first thing the automated voice does is ask you for your ten-digit phone number.  So I type it in, and when I finally reach a customer service rep, the first thing THAT person asks for is my ten-digit number.  So it makes me wonder why the hell I have to type it in in the first place. 

Cellular One sucks!    They suck !!   AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!  They suck!!!!!!

Ahem.

May 2000: Cell One calls with what sounds like a good offer.  $20 a month, 50 minutes free, a couple of other ups and extras.  They say they'll deliver the phone within nine days.  Of course, if you decide to return it, you only get three days.  Well, I received it, and to activate it, you need to provide your new cel number, which is on the paperwork, your zip code, and your PIN NUMBER, which is NOWHERE.  Neither is there any indication how to find this PIN.  I call service, and they say I have to call a different number to get the pin.  Well, it would be nice if the paperwork TOLD you this. 

OH.  And when you call .... the first thing they ask for is for you to punch in your new 10-digit cel number.  After navigating a few menus, they ask for it again.  When you finally reach customer service, they ASK YOU FOR IT AGAIN.  Why the hell am I giving it to them THREE FRIGGING TIMES?  What kind of crap system are they running there?

By the way, the Cell One service was awful, despite being in a VERY cel-friendly area.  I tried it out, it stunk, I called them back, gave them my phone number three more times, and deactivated it.  They warned me, return it within 72 hours or they'll bill me for the entire cost of the phone.  And now they keep sending me bills for fifty-one cents, for the cost of the trial calls I made to find out how crappy the service was.  This, despite the fact that they told me I had fourteen free minutes of air time to check it out.  GO TO HELL, guys.
 

MCI called a while back, said if I switched my long distance from AT&T, they'd give me a bunch of United frequent flier miles.  Sure, great, we said.  Four months later, MCI still couldn't bill us right, and we were still getting bills from AT&T, meaning MCI hadn't gotten the billing switched over.  After four months of complaining, we were told, "Oh, you have to call AT&T yourself and take care of it."  Oh really?  Nobody told us that up front, and nobody has said that the last four months.  We finally had them switch back.  Now they keep calling again, wanting to know if we'll switch back a second  time.  Jan 2002 update: MCI called again, asking us to switch.  I explained to the lady what happened last year.  She said, "Oh yes, that's when we were associated with WorldCom.  It was awful.  it really hurt our reputation.  We're doing great now."  So I was dumb for believing them then, but I'd be smart to believe them now?  Nah.
 

Doug from New Orleans  wrote me about HIS agonies with the phone company in the Virgin Islands, where he lived for eight years. He has a big honkin' system at home (NT, BSD, Novell, Linux) and the phone lines that appear to mark him as either an independent consultant or one of those offshore gambling site operators. Anyway, he found out, after a trip abroad, that he'd been nailed with incredible overcharges for over a year. If you wonder why it took him a year to figure it out, then you don't operate with multiple lines at home with large long distance charges(which you then expense to your employer, ahem). His bill, while he'd been away, was $184. They finally figured out they'd been nailing him with extraneous charges because they thought he had four fully-loaded lines instead of the two he actually had. He asked them to credit him for the overcharges, but they informed him he'd have to pay the $184 first, and THEN they could credit him. I thought on the Virgin Islands, you could hire guys with machetes to settle things like this FOR you.
 

Doug from down South sent me THIS one:

I have a frequent caller. Calls and hangs out, not a "breather" just listens, and my wife hangs up after three "hello's".  Never happens while I am here.

OK, I figger we have the technology, need to add caller ID....

• Call phone comany
• Get sales
• ask to add caller ID
• they say "no prob"
• Curious hacker-biker type that I am I ask "Who makes the hardware?"
• sales droid: "hardware?"
• Me: "yeah, the thing you hook to the phone to display the phone number..."
• SD: "Bell South"
• Me: "OK, help me with a concept, Bell South is in the communications business, right?"
• SD: "Yes"

• Me: "Who manufactures the unit, is it Microsoft?"
• SD: "I don't understand the question"
• Me: "OK, how much does it cost?"
• SD: "How much does what cost?"
• Me: (deep breath here, then we go to war) "All-right, I NEED to order a caller  ID unit, I need to order a caller ID service and I NEED to know how much it's going to cost!)
• SD: "What is your phone #?"

I  give them the number, my name, my address, and my acct #

SD: "Excuse me sir, we have no record of your account."

At this time I am holding in my hand a bill for in excess of $300

Me: "Kewl, that means I don't have to pay my phone bill....."

At this point my wife and my house keeper were making so much noise giggling I had to put the speaker phone on mute.
 
 

Fun with credit