Bone In The Throat

I’m a happy T-mobile Customer. But over the past 2 weeks I’ve been having dropped calls here at home. This is very strange and it wasn’t until this morning that I remembered why it seemed strangely familiar.
Let me step back a bit so that you see where I’m at with this.

I was a happy Cingular customer. I had a family plan, tons of roll-over minutes, great service (even here in the mountains), and a bill that I could budget around. In short life was good on the phone front.

Then AT&T bought Cingular and things continued along for a while so I was still a happy customer. However, as AT&T began absorbing the Cingular network, and integrating the two networks into one the service went to hell in pretty short order.

First there were problems with dead areas that hadn’t existed before.

Next there were people I simply couldn’t call using my cell phone (These were folks that were on the AT&T network).

These calls, when placed gave you a fast busy signal or that annoying bee de beep “The number you have dialed is incorrect please check the number and dial again“. But dialing the same number from a land line phone, or from another cell carrier got you a ring, and you were able to speak to the party you’d dialed.

Then there was my best friend, who until the day I left AT&T for T-Mobile, I couldn’t talk to for more than 8 minutes per call.

Yes folks, 8 minutes from the time the call was placed until the call was disconnected. You could set your watch by it. Funniest thing about this one is that He was also a Cingular -> AT&T conversion.

Through all of this, there were dropped calls, incomplete calls even calls where you reached someone but you’d been routed to a completely wrong number.

The best was me dialing someone in the 310 area code and actually getting someone in the 317 area code.

Yep I dialed a number in LA and got the same number in Indiana. Oh and before you jump to the conclusion that I’d misdialed, this is a friend of mine and he’s on speed dial. When I punched redial I got the buddy in LA.

AT&Ts response to all of this was everything from flat out denial that there was anything wrong to “there is something wrong with your phone“, to the attitude of “Clearly Mr Customer you don’t know how to use your phone.” All said in that lovely and almost unintelligible singsong accent we’ve all come to know and love, attached to someone that has no clue what we’re talking about.


Yes sir I understand your concern. Yes sir your phone isn’t working. Is the phone turned on? Yes sir I understand your concern. Have you used your phone before? You know you have to push the buttons to dial… Yes sir I understand your concern….. 90 minutes of that and you want to throw the phone against the wall and go back to smoke signals!

I know that I wasn’t alone. Thousands of people if not millions had to deal daily with the inconvenience and disappointment of having had Cingular which worked very well and then being saddled against their will, with what was and still is shitty service from AT&T.

I stayed with AT&T for several years after the merger. I had more roll-over minutes than god. I had an iPhone which I lost in a house fire. I replaced the iPhone with a Blackberry and was more or less satisfied.

Until I needed to make a change in my telephone plan and AT&T made 60% of my banked roll-over minutes disappear. And then AT&T told me “by the way, since you’ve changed your plan minutes you’re now subject to our new data plan rates too.”

The whole point of me changing the amount of plan minutes was that I wasn’t using as many per month and the roll-over minutes were accumulating at an insane rate.

I was trying to cut my expenditure on the cell phone bill and by the time all was said & done, AT&T had fucked me and actually shoved the monthly bill over $250.00 a month. When began the call to make the changes the bill was $199.00 and the ever so helpful scumbag in Bangalore or wherever just followed their script without actually mentioning what these changes were going to do, despite the fact that I told him what my purpose in calling was.

So after I got the first AT&T RAPE bill, I went shopping.

T-Mobile was selling a great plan and their phones worked much better than my AT&T shit.

40 minutes after I walked into a T-Mobile Store, I walked out with a shiny new 3G Slide, my same phone number, a reasonable bill, and an unlimited data plan. I even PAID the AT&T bastards a premium to exit their fucking contract.

Flash forward a year or so and AT&T is supposedly buying T-Mobile. WELL, FUCK ME Runnin!

However, that merger is a year and congressional hearings away. RIGHT?

So why then, am I suddenly having problems with my T-Mobile phone dropping calls? It just seems a little too familiar.