Dirkus Maximus

It seems that once again Albemarle Hospital has had to go out of their way to prove how bad they actually are.  I went up there today because I am having pain in my neck and back for no apparent reason.  I get up to the ER desk and they tell me they won’t treat me because I don’t have anyone with me who can watch my kids.  What kinda crap is that?  So if I had come in and was having a heart attack I can pretty much kiss my butt goodbye cause I didn’t drag a babysitter with me.  I ended up having to drive all the way to Chesapeake and go over to Chesapeake General to get treatment.    Chesapeake General does not seem to have an issue with patients that have children.  They told me that it appears to be a strained muscle and have me on muscle relaxers right now.  This hospital will be one more thing I do not miss after Dj finally gets done with college and we move from here.  Just a word of advice to all the N.C. folks out there, don’t waste your gas coming to Albemarle for anything. You will end up driving to Chesapeake for what you need in the end anyway.  Just go ahead and carry yourself to Chesapeake General, save yourself the trouble.

Dearest Stevie,

You should really look into this newfangled concept known as “strain releif” for the cables in your future products. It’s an idea where you put graduated thicknesses of material around a cable at the point where it enters a device or plug. It reduces the strain on the outer jacket and the conductors inside so that they don’t break and create problems, such as open circuits and short circuits. Go take a look at the cord on a vaccuum cleaner or something for inspiration. For an example of how this is not done right, LOOK AT ANY APPLE PRODUCT EVER MADE.

Seriously though, the cable with my iPhone should have lasted longer than a month before the cable started fraying. Strain releif on cables may not be pretty, but neither are broken, frayed, non-working or melted cables. Go google “apple MagSafe short strain releif” if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

OK, now that I’ve got just about everything on the site put back together, let’s have an update on that nasty AT&T business, shall we?

So, I finally received my iPhone, three weeks after I ordered it. Wes’s phone rolled in 3 days after that. My iPhone case rolled in about 3 days more after that.

AT&T did make some concessions after all the crap and misinformation that we received. They’re giving us 2 months free, plus 1000 rollover minutes, plus that $24 back that I was overcharged.

The ECO iPhone case that AT&T sells does NOT fit the iPhone. It’s WAY too tight. Also, don’t be fooled, there’s no belt loop on the back. It’s just a slip cover. I ended up giving it to Wes for her iPod touch instead. Trying to squeeze the iPhone in and out of there was a hell of a chore, but the iPod Touch fits just right.

Wes is “Okay” with her phone overall. I need to get a microSD card so I can save some custome ringtones to it for her, but overall she seems to like it well enough. She really hasn’t said much about it. I think she’s just still steamed at AT&T for their bullshit.

So how about that iPhone? I’d give it 4 stars out of 5. The flexibility is awesome. The apps are great. The user interface is the standard by which all other phones should be judged. There’s just some nagging things that kinda irk me.

The compass in the 3Gs is pretty much useless in a car, or near anything made of metal. When it’s working, it’s GREAT. When it’s not, it’ll do strange things like show you going the opposite direction of reality on a street, or show the map skewed by 90 degrees.

The phone has frozen up on me a few times. Two or three times while “sleeping”, and occasionally after running a app that uses a lot of graphics or a “heavy” web page.

There are some odd compatibility bugs with some apps. Palringo, for instance. Palringo works just fine on Wes’s 1st gen touch, but refused to pop up push notifications on my iPhone and would scramble conversations from multiple users.

The YouTube upload function of the camera has two stupid bugs; 1) if the phone goes to sleep while uploading, it kills the upload. 2) it always defaults to categorizing videos as “comedy”. This doesn’t even make sense. It *should* remember whatever the last selected category is, and use that. It would be understandable if it defaulted to the first item in the list. Comedy is the second item on the list though, why the hell does it default to that?

There should be a way to actually hide icons you don’t plan on using, aside from just banishing them to the last page of app icons.

The antenna in the 3Gs sucks. Lance has a 3G, and he regularly gets 4 bars and 3G at his desk, right next to mine. I get 2 bars, maybe, and edge. Sometimes shutting down and restarting the phone helps, but most of the time it’s just got crap for reception.

The camera lacks any kind of controls. Even my wife’s old Virgin Mobile phone AND her new Motorola free-phone have neat functions like exposure compensation and preset white balance settings. Not having that in this phone is STUPID, especially seeing as those are strictly software driven items. You put hundreds of thousands of manhours into designing the best touch-based UI man has ever seen, but you forget to add an exposure slider and a simple pull down for daylight/incandescent/fluorescent white balance? WTF?

Lastly, the headphone jack placement. I can understand that there’s not much room for it, but the bottom would be a much better place for the cord to be jutting out. Seriously. I hate the jack being at the top.

All of that said though, I don’t think I’d trade this thing for the world right now. It does so many damn things that I never knew I was missing. The ability to have what basically amounts to a location-aware, always-connected computer in the palm of your hand is incredible. Not to mention I’ve taken up posting to my flickr photostream and youtube much more since I have a camera in my pocket at all times. I’ve even opened a twitter account because of this damn thing.

So, what apps am I using? Lots of free ones. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Cheap Bastards Association. Some of the apps I’m using the most are…

• Echofon – free twitter app that includes automated insertion of Google maps links, photos, and videos. Also automatically shortens URLs. Pretty damn sweet for something that’s free.
• Bump – Contact/image/video transfer between iPhone OS devices. Think old-school palmOS “beam” functionality, but without the hassle of IR transmissions and with the addition of fist bumping. This should be standard software on every iPhone OS device. Apple needs to buy this company, and make this part of the iPhone OS. Seriously.
• AT&T myWireless – AT&T account monitoring and management. Pretty much a no-duh thing to have for an iPhone.
• fring – the all-in-one IM/Skype/video conferenceing app. My only gripe is that you can’t get rid of the damn “Fring Test Call” buddy listing.
• Pandora Radio – This is the most awesome thing ever. Screw both terrestrial and satellite radio.
• I Can Has Cheezburger – You’ve gotta have LOLcats. This is not optional.
• Flickr – The Flickr app is another no-brainer. Honestly, this should be part of the camera app, the same way that Youtube is in the camera app for video.
• PS Mobile – Photoshop… ON YOUR PHONE.
• Naturespace – …zzzZZZzzz… …zzzZZZzzz… *drool* *snort* Oh hey, was I supposed to write something here?
• Pic2Shop – Barcode scanner, with amazon and froogle integration. Pretty damn cool.
• 3D Camera Lite – Makes AWESOME stereographic images, either anaglyphs or cross/parallel image pairs.
• Ping Lite – Awesome little network scanning tool.
• Words With Friends Free – Scrabble, over the Internet. A¹W⁴E¹S¹O¹M⁴E¹.
• Fandango – Finds theaters near you, and displays showtimes. Pretty cool.

I also have a home screen link to Wunderground’s iPhone optimized site on my main screen, the url is http://i.wund.com and the fullscreen wundermap on that page is great.

In conclusion, I still hate AT&T’s customer service, but I’m willing to suffer their idiodicy for this phone.

So apparently TIffany DID managed to get my iPhone unfucked last night, and it shipped at 8:18pm. It’s currently in the Va Beach FedEx facility, and will probably be on it’s way to my house Real Soon Now. OUTSTANDING WORK, TIFFANY.

Now, my phone is no longer an issue, and while I am still GREATLY DISPLEASED by the way this whole thing has been handled, I’m ready to move forward. Westly, however, is a different story.

Her Motorola phone is still jammed up for no apparent reason, and every AT&T agent I talk to has the same “WTF” type of reaction to that fact every time I call. Wes is pissed at AT&T beyond all measure.

Attention AT&T: We have a saying here in North Carolina. “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” If Wes tells me to give you the boot, I’mma drop you like a bad habit. Seriously. I’ve been trying to calm her down about this over the past few days, but she’s so thoroughly done with you that she doesn’t even want to activate her phone if/when it arrives because she wants nothing to do with you or your service. She’d rather keep pumping money into her Virgin Mobile phone than deal with you.

Hopefully you are willing to step up to the plate to try and fix your image with her.

Thank you for your reply, Mary.

I do not currently have an account number, as I have been trying to actually *get* phones from your company for nearly 3 weeks now but have yet to receive them. I do, however, have an order number. The original order number was [REDACTED], but that has now been broken into several sub-orders with”-2″ and “-3″ at the end.

The wireless numbers I’m attempting to port over are [REDACTED] and [REDACTED].

My daytime number during the week is [REDACTED]. My evening and weekend contact number is [REDACTED].

Now, down to the meat and potatoes of the situation; I am GREATLY DISPLEASED with the way my order has been handled. While I *think* that the young lady I just spoke with this evening may have been able to resolve the issues currently preventing my phones from shipping after three weeks, I do have several major points that I would like for you to review in your ordering process. I described the customer service hurdles I’ve encountered in detail in the entries on my personal web site located at http://www.pwn3d.us but I will list the major points of contention here in brief to save you some time and reading:

* The failure of the online ordering system to account for porting multiple numbers from different carriers over to one account, resulting in porting disasters that hold up customer’s orders.
* The failure of your online live chat support to give me correct information about porting numbers from multiple carriers, also contributing to orders being held up.
* The failure of your agent to mention that “fixing” my order by canceling it and resubmitting it would result in my order being put “at the back of the line”, resulting in an order that was ready to be fulfilled becoming back ordered instead.
* The unauthorized change in pricing that occurred after I authorized the sale (increasing from $52.79 to $76.80) due to the cancellation and resubmission of my order.
* The severely unhelpful supervisor (Debbie Elliot) that tried her damnedest to weasel me out of the $24 difference after that unauthorized change happened by lying and mincing words with me for over half an hour.
* The rather sub-optimal ordering system that allows things to be ordered from the wrong warehouse, instead of automatically figuring out which warehouse has what product and shipping things as it should
* The apparent inability of your agents to look for viable solutions for upset customers (one of the things “Mike the Manager” did right was to look to see if the equivalent white iPhone was available when the black one I ordered was back ordered, one of the things an agent named Jennifer did wrong was offer me the privilege to pay over $100 more for virtually the same product and call that an “option”)
* The apparent inability of most of your agents to troubleshoot what’s wrong with an order (Of the 10 or so folks I’ve talked to over the past several days only ONE, “Carl”, noticed that there was some kind of “pre-paid status” glitch holding up part of my order that should have shipped days ago.)
* The ordering system that puts the brakes on a phone shipment because a $5 accessory is out of stock, depriving a customer of a phone because some minor accessory is sold out

Honestly, as a person who works in a technical support call center, I know for a fact that every customer contact is an opportunity to either gradually reinforce the customer’s confidence in your company, or rapidly tear it down. In my contacts with your call center my confidence in your company has been not only severely damaged, it’s been completely and utterly obliterated. At this point, my wife has asked me to cancel the order with your company and look into the pricing of other wireless carriers, even going so far as to say that AT&T is “all a bunch of f*cking liars and I detest having to give people like that the money I work hard for.” Based on my personal experience in actually dealing with your customer care department, I would tend to agree.

At this point I’m really just trying to get working phones for my wife and I, and get them at the price that I agreed to on your web site. I have been promised that as soon as I receive my phones and activate them that I will be credited the $24 difference in my order and that two months of my base rate plan will be waived as compensation for my time and frustration. This is almost acceptable. At this point, what I would like to have is two months of my entire service bill waived, not just the base rate plan, and have the “No ETF” grace period extended to the second month, instead of the normal 30 days. This will give my wife and I time to evaluate whether or not your company’s service is actually worth the time and aggravation we’ve endured in our attempts to purchase service from you.

If you want us to remain AT&T customers after that two month grace period, I would strongly suggest making sure that some remedial problem-solving and customer service training be put on the agenda for your customer care call center. They will need to be a shining example of courtesy and correct information in order to repair the damage they’ve already done to your company’s reputation in our eyes.

And honestly, it’s not just the two of us who have a poor impression of your company from this whole incident. All of my co-workers, even current AT&T customers, have been appalled at the disservice I have received. One co-worker who has been an AT&T customer for years stated that he had “heard some horror stories about their service, but yours is the worst I’ve ever heard!” I have been posting updates to my personal website as I stated before, and several of my family members have also commented that this is outrageous. My mother even went so far in a comment as to describe your service as a “bowl of S_ _ _ .” You’ve not only upset two customers who are trying to sign up for your services, you’ve upset several existing customers and several people who might have been potential customers.

I hope you will take this situation seriously, and I thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Dirk van den Brink, Jr.

OK, so Wes just got the callback that wsa scheduled for today from AT&T. “Kendra” informed her that the entire order was held up due to a case. A FUCKING $5 IPHONE CASE.

I call in and talk to Tiffany in online sales (no, a different one from earlier today) and she breaks the case out as a separate order, orders the iphone from the proper warehouse, and sends up an escalation request to management for the Motorola that should have shipped days ago. She sounded quite hopefull that it would ship tomorrow, but we’ll just have to see about that.

The problem with this is that it means that I’ll have to work my weekend computer repair hustle using my Boost mobile phone again, which means it’s time to buy YET ANOTHER farkin’ reboost card at a minimum of $10. I’m gonna have to do a whole HELL of a lot of talking to get my $10 worth out of that phone in 3 days.

While all this is going on, I also get a response to the email I sent to the CEO of AT&T:

Dear Mr. Van Den Brink,

Thank you for contacting AT&T Mobility. We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced. We would like the opportunity to address all your wireless concerns and customer service matters. In order for us to assist you, we need you to verify your account information in your e-mail to us. Please, respond to all on this email with the following information:

Account Number:

Wireless Number(s):

Contact Number(s):

Upon receipt of this information, we will contact you within 24 hours to address your concerns.

Thank you,

Mary Joudi

MaryMichelle Joudi
AT&T Mobility
HQ – Office of the President

Oh, you better beleive I’m gonna send you some info there, Mary. At this point, I *think* we’ve got the shipping issue locked down, but the issues that still need to be addressed are…

• The failure of the online ordering system to account for porting numbers from different carriers over to one account, resulting in porting clusterfucks
• The failure of your online live chat support to give me correct information about porting numbers from multiple carriers, resulting in my order getting held up
• The unauthorized change in pricing that occured after I authorized the sale
• The severely unhelpful supervisor (Debbie Elliot) that tried her damnedest to weasel me out of the $24 difference after that change
• The jacked up ordering system that allows things to be ordered from the wrong warehouse, instead of automatically figuring out which warehouse has what product and shipping things as it should
• The apparent inability of your agents to look for viable solutions for upset customers (one of the things Mike the Manager did right was to look to see if the equivalent white iPhone was available, one of the things Jennifer did wrong was offer to allow me the priveledge to pay over $100 more for the same product and call that an “option”)
• The apparent inability of most of your agents to troubleshoot what’s wrong with an order (Tiffany tonight confirmed Carl’s assertion that there’s some kind of “prepaid status” quirk holding up the order. Sorry about the earlier “BS” call on that one, Carl.)
• The ordering system that puts the brakes on a phone shipment because a $5 accessory is out of stock, depriving a customer of a phone because some pissant accessory is sold out

There’s more I can add for sure, but we’ll leave it at that for now. We’ll see how things go tomorrow, when my order enters its 3rd week. I don’t have my hopes up too high yet. I think the other guys in the cube farm are starting an office pool on when my phone will ship, and “never” is a popular option.

I called the order center again at about 4pm local time. “Carl” answered, and upon checking my order stated that it was stuck in some kind of “pre-paid status” caused by it being backordered. This apparently requires him to get some kind of form signed to release the order and get the iPhone to ship from the “backup” warehouse (which is, I’m assuming, the “wrong” warehouse I’ve heard so much about) and release the Moto EM330 from the main warehouse. And of course, no one else ever noticed this or thought to check it, and he always checks this first. Right.

Honestly, that all sounds like a crock of shit to me, and he’s probably sitting there talking to his buddies telling them about the great line of BS he just fed me.

Supposedly it’ll ship tomorrow, but he wouldn’t guarantee that for me. I have a guarantee for him though. I guarantee that if it doesn’t, I’ll cuss and holler at them until a manager calls me back.

Speaking of management, I haven’t received any feedback on the email I sent to my good buddy Randy, the CEO of AT&T. I’m certain his email is filtered by some executive assistant or something, and has ended up in the circle file. Either that, or AT&T knows that email address is being circulated on the web and just has it forward to /dev/null or something. I also haven’t received any of the callbacks various agents have scheduled for me. I was due one on Friday, before “Mike The Manger of the Order Bungling Department” called, and I was due one today too.

I called the customer care number at 1-800-331-0500 this morning at 11:00. “Tiffany” answered, and told me that both orders were still “in progress” and should ship by tomorrow. (RIGHT.) I asked her why Wes’ phone hadn’t shipped, even though I’d been told repeatedly that there are plenty of that model in stock. She then called the online sales group, who informed her that both phones were completely out of stock, but they’re expecting a shipment tomorrow, so my order should ship tomorrow. (RIGHT.)

I then called the order fulfillment department at 1-866-391-0749 at 11:15. The automated system told me that my order would ship the next business day. (RIGHT.) So I hit “0″, and talked to “Kaitlyn” who tells me that no, they have more than 500 iPhones in stock, but they’re in the wrong warehouse. And there’s several thousand of the wife’s Moto EM330 in stock, and she has NO IDEA why that hasn’t shipped yet, but it should totally ship by tomorrow. (RIGHT.)

Tomorrow, we officially hit the 3-week mark. I’ve emailed links to my blog posts to The Consumerist and to Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T. Maybe they can get something moving for me.

Honestly, at this point I’m just too involved with this to go elsewhere for service. I want to see this thing through to the end. I will get my phones, and I will call four times a day from now until I am satisfied with the outcome of this situation.

If they want to give me horrible customer service, I’m going to give them a horrible customer.

So I still don’t have my phones. They haven’t even shipped. They’re still both “backordered.”

I called this morning and “Karen” said they have both the white iphones and the Moto EM330’s in stock and that the order would ship today for sure.

It didn’t.

I called again, and apparently while there’s over 500 of the phone I ordered in stock, they’re “in the wrong warehouse” according to the young lady I talked to. (I don’t even remember her name) There’s NO ETA on when they’ll get to the right warehouse, and no one has any idea when they’d ship to me.

Additionally, my wife’s Moto EM330 still hasn’t shipped either, despite the fact that “Jennifer” broke it into it’s own separate order on Monday, presumably so that it could ship on it’s own, AND despite the fact that everyone I’ve talked to says there’s over 11,000 of those units in stock.

I can’t fucking believe this. HEY, AT&T! I WANT TO GIVE YOU OVER $2,000 OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS. I REALLY DO. PLEASE GIVE ME PHONES AND TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY.

It’s to the point where Wes even stated in a Googletalk IM that she wants to cancel her part of the order and stick with Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go instead.

“[AT&T is] all a bunch of fucking liars and I detest having to give people like that the money I work hard for.”

A little tip for you about my wife; when you piss her off to the point of her dropping the F-Bomb in verbal conversation, she’s severely pissed. When you get her to drop it in typed communications where she has the opportunity to go back and filter her thoughts and calm it down, you’ve fucked up ROYAL.

The bad part is that if I do cancel the order and re-order just the iPhone and the minimum plan for it, it would cost $160 up front and $75/month, as opposed to staying with the current order for $52 up front and $99/mo for TWO phones and lines.

Dropping the whole thing and going to T-Mobile isn’t much of a deal either. There’s no refurbed G1’s available right now, and the upfront cost would be well more than double for the phones alone, and that doesn’t even include any accessories like the car charger my wife would need. I have considered calling them up and asking if they’d like to steal a customer from AT&T though. Someone at work who uses them told me that they actually do their damnedest to get and keep customers. You know, completely UNLIKE AT&T.

So to conclude today’s chapter of my ongoing AT&T saga, FUCK YOU AT&T. FUCK YOU VERY MUCH.

And for some reason, I’ve got a feeling that tomorrow will be the same story all over again.

More than two weeks after I ordered Wes and I phones from AT&T, they still have no idea when/if we’ll be getting them.

Friday evening, after bitching AT&T out on a phone survey at the end of another fruitless call to see if my phones were going to ship, a person identifying themselves as a manager named Mike called me, and offered to not only put a note on my account to refund my $24.01 after the order shipped but also give me a free month of service, AND get my order switched over to the white iPhone (instead of the black one I originally ordered). He assured me he had plenty of those in stock, and that it would ship promptly on Monday and arrive Tuesday.

Yeah, It’s Monday, and nothing shipped.

A quick phone call later, I find that like so many other AT&T reps before him, Mike has lied to me too. Not only did he order it from the wrong warehouse (HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN?!) but apparently the white iPhones are just as backordered as the black ones. What’s even better is that Mike’s offer to cancel my existing order and re-place the order with a white one has put me at the back of the backorder list again. Had I known that, I would have told him HELL NO.

Even mroe fun; “Jennifer” offered me some other options she thought would be helpful tonight…

1) Just leave my order as-is, and wait till they ship (Or Jesus comes back. Whichever comes first, I suppose.) OR

2) Just go ahead and have her re-submit my order, but for a new iphone at full price. Yeah, because paying $199 MORE for something I was supposed to get over a week ago for $52 is a real bargain there, hot stuff. OR

3) Just buy some other phone or something. You didn’t really want that phone you ordered anyway, right?

On the upside, Mike and Jennifer both offered me a month of free service each. So yeah, that’s awesome that you’re going to knock the bill down for two months, AND credit me the $24 back. That doesn’t do a GODDAMNED THING FOR ME THOUGH, SEEING AS I DON’T HAVE SERVICE WITH YOU YET.

At this point, I’m just hanging in there because AT&T has the best rate on a smartphone plan, and the iPhone has a really great user-interface, and I got a killer deal on it. Other than that, I would NEVER EVER SUGGEST AT&T TO ANYONE, ANYWHERE, FOR ANY REASON. EVER. PERIOD.

Man, where do I begin? Let’s start when I decided to take the plunge and buy an iPhone from AT&T on the morning of Black Friday…

Everything was looking good; the 16GB iPhone 3Gs was on sale at $49 for a refurb, activation was waived, and there was a $50 new customer promotion for accessories when ordering online. I priced out an iPhone for myself and a decent (and free-with-contract) Motorola flip-phone for my wife to replace our aging pay-as-you-go phones from Boost and Virgin, along with $49.97 worth of accessories mostly for my wife’s new phone to take full advantage of the $50 promotion. My total, plus tax, was $52.79. What an awesome deal! I loaded everything into the online shopping cart, asked my wife pretty please, and then pulled the trigger on the order. Seconds later, I had a confirmation email in my inbox, and the world was good.

One minor hitch during the purchase process did bug me though, the AT&T website (understandably) assumed that both of the numbers I was porting from the old cell phones were on the same account, and therefore it only asked me for one set of information for porting. That kinda bugged me, so I hit the “Chat with a live agent” button on the AT&T website and asked how that was going to work out. The agent was very friendly, told me that was a good question, and asked me to wait a moment while she checked for me. A minute or so later, she returned and let me know that I would be able to fix that once I received my phones and called to activate them. Since I didn’t know better, I went ahead and thanked her and gave her a glowing review on the little survey that popped up after the chat was finished.

Fast forward to Monday. I had been checking my order status throughout the day to see when my order shipped. It never did. In fact, my order never even came up on the order status system at all. Monday evening, I contacted AT&T to find out what was going on with the awesome deal I had landed. After talking with a customer care agent who had no idea what was going on, I was transferred to the e-commerce department. A young lady named Angela found my order, figured out that the failed porting request had put the whole thing on hold (Gee, thanks Ms. Live-Chat-Lady) and put me through to Emily in the porting department. Emily got the porting requests straightened up in a flash, and I was back with Angela again.

Angela told me that she had resubmitted my order, that the order would be going out Tuesday via FedEx Priority, and would most likely arrive Wednesday. I also asked her to verify the order amount. She said it was still as I ordered it, $52.79.

An hour or so later, I receive an email stating that there was a problem with my order, and that I needed to contact AT&T to provide more information. This is where the trouble began.

I called AT&T to find out what the issue was now. The agent I talked to said there was no apparent issue, and that she would go ahead and mark the order for processing. I was just about to thank her and hang up when something told me to ask one more question: Is the total still $52.79? The answer was no, it was $76.80.

WHAT!?! After talking to the agent for a few more moments, she assured me that my 50% discount on the accessories was still in place. I told her NO, that wasn’t a 50% discount, it was a $50 discount. I asked to speak with a supervisor. She placed me on hold.

40 minutes of crappy hold music with annoying ads later, a supervisor named Debbie Elliot answers, only to place me on hold immediately again. A few moments later, she came back and the FUD was flowing deep. First, she claimed that there was no $50 new customer online discount. I showed her where the page for it was on their site. ( http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-sales/promotion/50off-wired.jsp?PROMO=promo290009 ) Then she claimed that the discount didn’t apply to the iPhone. I agreed, but pointed out that it was not the iPhone I was trying to have discounted, it was the accessories for the Motorola. Then she tried to say that the discount didn’t apply to additional lines on family plans. I pointed out that a) there was no mention of such a restriction anywhere in the huge disclaimer at the bottom of the page and that b) the cart should not have told me I was going to get $50 worth of discounts if that was the case. THEN Debbie tries to tell me that the discount page says “Up to $50″, and that it’s actually a 50% discount. I point out that again, there’s no mention of such a limitation anywhere on that page, and that the cart should have reflected this fact if there was one.

Finally, I brought it down to the bottom line for Debbie. The site said $52.79. I agreed to pay $52.79. I will pay $52.79, and not a cent more. Debbie’s response was, more or less, that I would pay $76.80 and get over it. “It’s only $24. I don’t see what the problem is.”

Yeah, Deb. $24 is a tank of gas in my car. That’s 350+ miles of driving to and from work. (Yes, I drive a rollerskate.)

Finally, out of desperation, I asked Debbie to remove all the accessories from my order in order to drop it back to the original price. She refused, stating that she can’t change the order because AT&T has a “Ship-as-ordered” policy. I reminded her that if it was truly “shipped-as-ordered”, it would only cost $52.79. I then asked Debbie if she had the authority to give customers complimentary accessories to retain a customer who’s about to cancel their service. She said yes. I then asked her to cancel my order and then resubmit it with just the phones, and then comp me the accessories. She refused to do that as well.

In the end Debbie told me that in order to get my phones I would HAVE to pay the $76.80, and that after the phones shipped I would have to call in to the customer care line (1-800-331-0500, then 0, then 0 again) and ask them if they would give me a credit on my first bill. I asked her if she could definitely say they’d give me the $24 back, and she said that she couldn’t guarantee it. I said “FINE.” and hung up on her, after 2 hours of arguing and horrible hold music.

The issue STILL isn’t resolved, as now apparently all orders from Black Friday are shipping and emptying out the warehouses. Since my order was canceled and resubmitted by Angela on the following Monday, I’m now locked solidly in backorder hell, with no ETA on when my phones will ship. It’s been a week since my order, and I’ve been informed by the AT&T website, the automated telephone order status system and at least one phone rep at various times that my order will “definitely ship tomorrow.”

So, for those keeping tabs, AT&T’s site lied to me about the price, Ms. Live-Chat-Lady gave me misinformation that held up my order, Angela gave me misinformation about the cost of my purchase and got it locked in backorder hell, everyone and everything has lied about when it’ll ship, and Debbie Elliot tried a zillion different ways to lie to me and worked very hard at being exactly unhelpful.

In case this gets read by an AT&T employee, and in case AT&T actually cares, keeping me as a customer at this point means not only giving me $24 back, but also giving me my first month of service free to compensate me for all my wasted time, the misinformation, and aggravation. Otherwise, I’m just going to go to Verizon or T-Mobile instead.

Also, if anyone at Apple takes notice of this, please consider dropping your exclusivity with AT&T as soon as the current agreement ends; do NOT extend it again. I like your products well enough, but your choice of partners has me pretty pissed off right now. While it’s not your fault, and has nothing to do with your device, it reflects badly on the whole customer experience for a product that’s supposed to “Just Work.” Besides, competition in the marketplace will be a winning proposition for you, the carriers, and the consumers.

The stupid, it burns.

… because it obviously is trying to commit suicide by closing itself to protect me from itself. Or something.

You know what really grinds my gears? Stupid mobile IM software that leaves you “logged in” for some obscene amount of time after you’ve closed the program and put your device to sleep.

Here’s a tip, app developers; if people want to send me a message regardless of my online status, there’s already a facility for doing that called “e-mail.” It’s been around for a while now. You should look into it.

If someone sends me an “instant message”, it’s under the assumption that I’m online and will be able to answer them right then. They don’t want to have to guess wether or not I’m actually online like the app says, or if my account has been hijacked by some stupid zombie IM app.

Long rant made short: when I close an IM app, log me the hell out, don’t keep me online in zombie status for 30 minutes. Ass.

Wes’ Valentines day gift was never “picked up”, it just magically appeared at the FedEx facility in Sacramento 2 days after it was shipped. Now it’s been “in transit” in Reno NV for over 36 hours. Seriously, I don’t think they know where the package is, where it came from, and may not know where it’s going. Hopefully they’ll hire a supersonic jet to get it here by the estimated delivery time tomorrow. I’ve never had this much difficulty tracking a UPS package. This is the last time I ship with FedEx.

Update: They have failed me for the last time. The package has not arrived. I called their 800 number, and the automated system said that the package was still in transit to the FedEx facility in zip code “233200″ [sic]. Yeah, last I checked US zip codes were 5 digits, not 6. I think it speaks volumes of a shipping company when they can’t even get something like the number of digits in a ZIP code right. I’m not sure if I’ll ever receive my order.

Remember how I said one of the kids dumped an orange soda into my trusty SD300? Well, my options for getting it back up and running were

• Send it in for repair. Of course, the second the guys at the factory service center see the words “liquid damage”, they just call it Beyond Economical Repair, box it back up, and kick it back out the door to me. End result? I’m out by shipping, and still have a busted camera.
• Upgrade. I can take the “Canon Loyalty Program” option, and get one of…
  • A refurb’d SD890 IS for $150 plus $10 shipping
  • A refurb’d G9 for $349 plus $10 shipping
  • A refurb’d EOS Rebel XT with lens for $299 plus $10 shipping

  The rub here is that I have precisely… (counts change in pockets) $10.59 to my name until payday. Maybe I’ll have like… $15 after that.

• Do it myself. Always the most entertaining option, and normally cheapest. I just have to order the parts from the parts desk up in Jamesburg.

The problem is that the DIY route, while cheaper than the upgrade, is still not “cheap.”

Yeah, buddy. That’s comin’ outta someone’s ass. I hope none of the three kids were counting on getting allowance between now and say, their 30th birthday. And the tooth fairy’s gonna start leaving a bill for disposal costs instead of a dollar under the pillow for a while too.

Back in October and November of ‘08, the Srizbi and Rustock Spammer botnets were seriously wounded by a series of actions by administrators around the world. Most notably, the folks at Hurricane Electric. Hurricane provided Internet backbone connectivity to a shady server farm business called “McColo” who’s client base used their collocated servers as the command center for hundreds of thousands of PC’s infected with malicious software.  These zombie PC’s would “call home” at regular intervals, download templates and address lists, and then spew Spam onto the Internet in massive quantities. Hurricane was presented with some rather compelling evidence about it’s downstream client’s bad behavior, and subsequently pulled the plug on their part of their internet connectivity, in a coordinated move with the other telecommunications companies that were selling connections to Mc Colo. The decapitation of these botnets resulted in a roughly 40% drop in the amount of email spam worldwide. So, did anyone actually notice that drop? Did it change the rate of any other types of Spam?

Yeah. That's a significant drop.

How about “HELL YEAH.” At one point, my blog had to filter out 237 spam comments in one day, though the average was closer to 100. Lately, nine spams a day is a “bad day.” I can’t even begin to imagine the processing overhead that was freed up on the world’s mail and website servers the day those bots died.

So, what can John Q. Public do to prevent another outbreak of zombified, spam-spewing PC’s clogging up the Internet? It’s quite simple really, let me break this down into a four-point-plan for you after the link: (more…)

Replacing a faucet should not require HACKSAWING THE OLD ONE OFF.

I hate OLD plumbing even more.

A busy desk is a sign of a busy mind... oh who am I kidding, this is a trainwreck.

Two printers, three computers, two camcorders, three barplugs, two coffee mugs, eleventy billion cables of varying size and function, and no idea where the f*ck my pen is hiding.

I was reading the news online the other night, and a sad, frightening realization came over me.

My children may see the death of a president and hellacious riots in their lifetime.

I think Obama was the right choice for the presidency, but after reading so many headlines about senseless aggression towards his supporters, violence, racial slurs on signs in shop windows, stories of schoolchildren chanting “Assasinate Obama!”, and assassination plots already being busted before he was even announced as officially being the democratic party’s nominee, I fear that he’s not even going to make it through the first year. While I really REALLY hope he makes it, I’m very worried that some fruitcake skinhead with a single-digit IQ and a gun will slip past the secret service and ruin everything. But while the idea of the assassination of the leader of the free world is scary in itself, it’s the prospect of what may happen in the hours after such an event that shakes me to the bone, because the backlash in the opposite direction would be devastating.

Remember in 1992, when Rodney King got the everliving crap beat out of him on tape by a bunch of cops who didn’t know the meaning of “appropriate force”? Remember how after the courts let them get away with it, all hell broke loose and rioters caused millions of dollars of damage throughout L.A. and the surrounding areas, killing 53 people? That was Joe Average Citizen getting beaten excessively in an adrenaline and (allegedly) race-fueled takedown. What I’m talking about is the prospect of the first African-American president of these United States of America getting shot by some neo-nazi fruitloop with a racial agenda and an assault rifle. Sweet Jesus, if that happens, the country’s gonna burn to the ground.

I don’t care who you are or how you feel about this election, I think we all need to think about, pray for, and keep an eye out for the president. His presidency, more than any other, is directly linked to the peace and well-being of this country. We must be cautious not to let anyone compromise it. If someone does, we will all pay the price.

Good luck, Barack.

This grill/smoker/turkey fryer all-in-one combo was supposed to be my 5 year anniversary gift from Canon. I think UPS took one look at this package, and decided to run it over repeatedly with a small herd of elephants. The box was demolished, parts were dented, the paint was chipped off, there’s water and rust streaks, the lava rocks were crushed into a fine powder and were pouring out of the box and coating everything inside, most of the assembly hardware was missing, the handles were missing, and someone decided to toss in three random pieces of wood that aren’t even supposed to BE in the kit. I’m guessing someone else’s smoker/grill is in similar condition, and they’re missing some of the wood they were supposed to get. This is my ANGRY DIRK FACE: >:-( Click the thumbnails to see the images full size.