More Large company antics

First Post.........

Feeling like chattel today. I used to be an AT&T wireless customer. We all know they were bought by Cingular a while ago. So after dealing with the issues of my company plan not mapping directly to the new Cingular billing system, and resulting overages (which is a whole other story) I run into this....

I come to find out recently that my pager service at xxxxxxxxx@mobile.att.net stopped working. It worked fine for a while after the merger, and then suddenly stopped. I use this service in business so equipment at client sites can contact me where there is a problem. So I finally get the time to call Cingular and traverse the voice mail jail to get to customer service to find out what my new address is. 3 calls, involving 2 random disconnects, and I get an answer to my simple question "What is my new pager address for E-mail delivery?" Silly me not to try it with the rep on the phone. Turns out it is the wrong answer. Another call through voice mail jail and finally I get and test the correct answer. For those who care: xxxxxxxxxx@mmode.com is the correct answer.

So why is it that 2 super large telecommunications companies can't set up a simple E-mail forwarding for addresses on the AT&T system mapping to new Cingular addresses? Or transfer the mobile.att.net domain to Cingular until all AT&T customers contracts run out? It doesn't seem technically challenging, and would be great transparent customer service. It seems that 4 calls from tons of subscribers to technical support is easier. It took close to an hour of my time to deal with getting a simple answer. And a bunch of time and effort on theirs to provide the support.

My customers would never accept this type of technical snafu, but we the consumer are growing more and more like chattel that are sold, bartered, and traded. We moo our way through the voice mail mazes to our slaughter.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley