Someone at AT&T must go to jail. Calling Elizabeth Warren . . .

As far as I can tell, anyone who has an iPhone that is stuck with AT&T hates AT&T, but accepts it as a given that the service is poor, unpredictable, and generally awful.

But somehow, I think we have come to accept the AT&T bad service as a sort of benign neglect that the network is so bad that the hate has taken on somewhat of a familial hate, where we despise the company, but because in some weird way they are like family so we put up with them, like certain relatives that we might see once a year at Thanksgiving.

That was true for me until yesterday just before 1:00 PM.

That was when I got my monthly text message from AT&T announcing how much would be billed to my credit card.

July 21, the message told me that my monthly bill was $117.83

August 21, the message said the monthly bill was $119.46

Yesterday, the message told me my monthly bill was $412.21.

That’s a 254% increase from the previous month, when the previous month delta was 1.4%

Assuming this was all some sort of mistake, I called AT&T and the woman on the phone quickly assured me that this was because of a significant increase in usage, something that didn’t, and doesn’t sound right to me.  But that gets to the heart of why I am writing this blog.

Since it’s their word against mine, and I really wasn’t expecting my cell phone bill to be 254% higher than it was the month before (it didn’t seem like I used my cell phone any more than usual), I put my tail between my legs, as it were, and asked the woman if there is any way to set alerts to let me know when I have crossed certain billing thresholds so that I can cut back on my usage – really trying to make the best of a bad situation.   My real goal was to prevent this from happening again.  Her response was that I can login and check up on the status of my account any time.  Figuring she hadn’t understood the question, since it has already been established that it’s REALLY easy for them to send me a text message, I told her that didn’t answer my question.  From there she told me in a very stern, unfriendly tone “your phone is your responsibility and it’s your responsibility to keep track of your usage.”  Really!?

This reminds me of the signs in rooms that declare maximum occupancy rates (who is really going to keep count?)

This reminds me of elevator weight limits (do they expect us to announce our weights to ensure the total doesn’t exceed the limit?)

With our mobile devices, it’s completely unrealistic to keep track of the total of the minutes we use, and if AT&T wants to charge me a dollar a day for a report to be sent to my device to tell me about my minutes, when the bill for this utility service can swing by 245% in one month, I would pay that, though weekly probably makes more sense in my case.

The point is that this is predatory behavior and AT&T should be ashamed of themselves.  It’s bad enough that I am stuck with them because I have an iPhone, but for them to be so rude to me and not give me any option to easily, simply report on usage should be a crime. A felony.

Shame on you AT&T.

I hope Elizabeth Warren of the new consumer protection bureau puts you high on your list, someone should go to jail for this.  A 245% swing in cost for a commodity function is wrong.  AT&T needs to do some rethinking.  Now.

-Ric