"Past experience no indication of future performance" is the answer today after I spoke with a very curt customer service rep. Now in her defense I probably wasn't the most pleasant person she ever spoke with so I won't be talking about her any more.
I don't do a great deal of posting in community forums, I was a customer of Cingular for a year or two before AT&T took them over and this is my first posting, so you can see I am pretty patient when it comes to customer service issues. Not only am I patient but I am generally pretty satisfied with Ma Bell and have even talked my dad, and a friend into moving over from Sprint and T-mob respectivelyn (yes they will veryify this).
But today got me a little upset and I thought I would share it with the community so that others could be aware that things are not always as they seem.
My work has been hit and miss for several months now. Because of that all of my creditors have been paid late at one point or the other, and some more than once. AT&T falls into this later group with me being late (sometimes by only a day or two, other times a lot more) almost every month and actually being temporarily disconnected a little while back. In all of this I will give AT&T the credit they deserve, they have been more than patient and have worked with me every step of the way. This is one of the reasons that I have been so loyal to them.
Up until this month I knew that I would not get disconnected if I paid my bill in full prior to being 30 days late. This is the way it has ALWAYS been, and I thought it would be the way it always was...NOPE!
14 days into being late I was disconnected. Now I owe an additional $40 reconnect fee along with my bill, making a difficult situation even more so. AT&T says they tried to contact me via phone twice. I do not doubt that they did, I receive a lot of phone calls and voicemails and the overwhelming majority of them are junk so I mass delete most if not all of them. I did not however receive an email as they claim, I checked. My wife and I were actually talking yesterday about paying the bill earlier than usual this month and hopefully getting back on track, but again we thought we had 16 more days to do that because we ALWAYS HAVE IN THE PAST. I do not have a problem with a company having any disconnect period that it wants, as long as it applies its rules consistently over time so I know what I am dealing with and can plan accordingly. When for 8+ years it has been 30 days, and then for it to be less that 30 all of a sudden is a little crazy, especially when it costs me $40 that I really don't have. AT&T claims that it says in the TOS that anytime after the past due date they can disconnect service without notice. Ok I will take your word for it, however I will say this, AT&T is THE ONLYcompany that I deal with that has such an abusive clause in their TOS. And had they been so inconsistent in the past I most likely would have moved on to a more customer oriented company. I need to know that the gigantic organizations that I deal with are going to treat me with at least a modicum of consistency, and in all honesty I would really prefer that a company that I have given money to every month for over 8 years might see their way clear to work with me in my TEMPORARY struggles as opposed to penalize me and make my struggles even more burdensome... Perfect world dreams aside, I doubt that my issue today will make me change carriers ( I do have another phone with Sprint that is strictly for data useage, had to do it since AT&T took away unlimited data on the air cards...) but I like my AT&T phone service and don't see any reason at the moment to change. That may not be the case when my wife's contract is up however...I will definetly reasses and see then, I only know that Sprint doesn't seem to have any problem giving me 30 days...