Letter to AT&T

Dear AT&T,

The situation began on a Saturday morning. I had retrieved the mail, and was already ripping open an envelope from you. It was not a bill from AT&T Wireless (the only service from AT & T that we actually have), a company which I imagine will soon be called Cingular. By the way, did anyone ever ask us whether we wanted to write a check to a company that spells its name wrong? However, I digress. Let's return to the scene wherein I opened the mail. Inside the official-looking envelope, my husband and I discovered a "Statement" charging us $4.42 for an mysterious and undisclosed "service" on a phone line in our house, a phone line which hasn't been connected for the last two years! The "bill" broke down the payment "due on February 10, 2004" into two parts: Other charges and credits.....4.29 and Taxes and surcharges: .13.

Our latest approach to unsavory consumer problems which arrive via the mail is to spring into immediate action. We dial the 800 number and whip files from drawers. We try to squash the problem while we are still feeling angry about it, instead of waiting until we are beaten down and would rather pay $4.29 than argue. We imagined AT &T sending these bills to every consumer with a phone line and then we pictured how many unaware customers would pay the bill, and how AT&T would make millions off of the weak or naïve. What a scam, we thought. We called the 800 "Customer Service" number on the "bill," determined to stop this minor theft in its tracks.

My husband spoke with a woman who gave every indication of being in a customer service center in India. Though I'd read that customer service representatives in India were trained to have an "American Midwestern" accent, apparently the training wasn't all that effective, since her accent was noticeable. When he described our bill problem to her, she read him canned answers from a script. The woman charged with dealing with our "bill" could have been halfway across the world. Could she picture or understand our California house with the phone line and the computer? Could she possibly sympathize? She agreed to "remove the charges" (were there ever really charges in the first place?...but, no, don't ask) and to remove the account. She gave my husband a confirmation number which he had carefully asked for. And then she (yes, the story gets ever more cynical and clueless) proceeded to try and sell him AT&T products. The hand of the creature didn't know what the foot was doing. Or maybe the hand just didn't care. Surely there was no head. Could any head have really planned this scenario?

I don't remember always being this cynical about large corporations. I have a dim memory that sometime in the recesses of time-perhaps the 50s- "the customer was always right." The representatives of corporations actually seemed to care (or at least pretended to care) whether you took your business elsewhere; they appeared to care whether you thought their actions were wrong and/or immoral. So when did my cynicism begin? Was it the time when our kid connected to the Internet through the "wrong" phone prefix to the tune of $1500 while we were in Europe? When we protested that charge, an executive in a downtown Pacific Bell office said he'd "see us in court?" Was it when American Express Blue refused to give me a "preapproved" credit card, even though my husband already had such a card? I could tell they never read my letters because I wrote some pretty silly things to them; they responded in turn with computer-generated letters which never related to what I'd written them. Ultimately I got the card through the American Express online site and was given a credit limit of over $8,000. I went from being a credit bum to extremely credit worthy in one minute. More hand/foot confusion. Or could it have been the more recent event of the late model Ford we owned whose dashboard began separating from the windshield and crumbling? Ford said that the recall was over, that they wouldn't fix the car. Even the dealer said we should fight the decision. But who has time to spend fighting these bills? We have to work so that we can pay them! And how much did it cost to repair the dashboard...approximately $1500. $1500 is about half of my take home salary each month. But could we really let our daughter drive around in a car with a crumbling dashboard? Weren't there safety issues? Yes, you guessed it, AT ; we got the dashboard fixed.

I remember years ago that my Dad became so mad at Sears that he refused to shop there. I also remember that he got angry at an airline and made phone calls until he went "all the way to the top." I think he got satisfaction that time. He never was happy with Sears again. I could call him up and ask him why, but he's been dead lo these 20 years. Being a Camel smoker, he died of lung cancer. I think the head knew about that one, AT.

Sometimes we decide to switch things around in our lives around because we start having a creeping feeling that we're being taken. Some months ago, we cut back our Comcast cable. We realized that we didn't really need the golf channel and all those channels with the mediocre, endlessly repeating movies. We tried calling Comcast, but it was really difficult to figure out from their descriptions what channels you would actually get for your money. Bronze package, silver package; it was all very vague. We scaled down and replaced watching TV with watching movies from Netflix. This move also conveniently eliminated those endless Blockbuster late fees. I love finding my chosen Netflix movies in their red packages arriving in the mail, and yet I wonder if I've just replaced one monster with another. What happened to free TV? I'm old enough to remember the 50s when you watched TV for free with just a television set and a set of rabbit ears on the top that you bent here and there if the reception wasn't good. I sometimes wonder how we could get channels in those days without cable, and if cable companies actually do something now to block reception.

So, AT, it's not really just you. And I don't really begrudge the woman in India the job that could have stayed right here in the United States, though I think it would have been better if the representative could picture and understand my house and my life here in California. Really, I want people in India to have jobs. But I have kids still going to college and they could possibly work at this type of job, you know, because it's very expensive these days to go to college and kids have to work. And what would jobs like this pay? I'm guessing at $12 per hour. Also at the school where I work many of the high school seniors need jobs; they need jobs so that they can go to the prom, pay their car insurance and save for college. Some of them even help their parents with bills. Many of them could do that customer service job just fine. They're smart, polite, hardworking and, in many cases, bilingual (What do those Indian customer service reps do with callers who speak Spanish or maybe Cantonese or Tagalog?). In my lifetime I have worked at a telephone customer service in a cubicle and glad enough I was of the paycheck. It wasn't that bad a job, aside from the feeling that the phone calls were relentless; the various callers were sometimes grateful, and occasionally they were amusing and witty. So, it's certainly feasible to bring the jobs back to the United States, what with the number of qualified people who need jobs and would be grateful for the paycheck, but, like I said before, I don't begrudge workers in India the jobs.

But the greed thing...the $4.42 per household...could you rethink it?