http://disqus.com/people/f83f9b527627f28a0f9762a8984bdc80/enWed, 01 Oct 2008 11:24:41 -0000http://sbr.disqus.com/at038t_business_careless/#comment-2779417Hey, AT&T has sucked for about a decade now. I can remember when you got excellent support from AT&T but back then, you had a dedicated sales rep who managed to stop by for a visit once a month or so for a chat to see if you needed anything and make sure everything was working well. He/She was always on top of things and you had great service and was happy. Then, AT&T decided to take away the dedicated local reps and instead put you in the hands of some jackass idiot back at some office located hundreds or thousands of miles away whom you never really met or got to know and who didn't give a rats butt whether you were a happy customer or not. I went through this nightmare years ago with them after they took away our local rep and after more than a year of trying to get somewhere with the desk-bound "rep" and his boss and his boss's boss and so on with no results, I told them to kiss my butt and switched all of our business over to SBC. Can you believe I wanted to add a new service to our account with AT&T and couldn't get it done for over a year?! The stupid rep kept giving me the run around and I kept calling trying to get something done and the prick had the nerve to stop taking my calls. I tried to go over his head and his manager's were just as non-responsive as he was. Heck, I went all the way to the presidents office, supposedly, and couldn't get anything done with them and I was trying to give them more money for crying out loud. But guess what, SBC had local reps and they took good care of us and we were very happy for several years again. Our SBC rep lived right here in the same town where our company was located and he was easy to deal with and always anxious to try to meet our needs. Later when I switched companies, I ended up with AT&T yet again and if anything, their support and service had gotten worse; so as soon as the contracts expired, I replaced them all with SBC contracts and I was happy again... For about a year anyway, then SBC does something really stupid, they buy AT&T. No, that in and of itself wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but instead of making AT&T take SBC's business policies, SBC basically transformed themselves into AT&T, they even took the name!!! Now, again I'm stuck with AT&T and not just for my local and LD service, they transformed Cingular into AT&T too! The first thing that happened after SBC became AT&T, was they did away with the local reps again. For close to a year, I didn't have an idea of who my rep was and then when I finally got notice from the newly assigned rep, they had several shuffles that left me wondering from month to month who to call. I had some issues that needed to be handled during that time and every time I got a new rep (almost monthly), I'd have to start the process all over again. But finally, I did get a rep who could be considered local. He's only about 60 miles away and he does come to see me a couple times a year and he has been able to help get everything lined out so at the moment, I'm pretty happy with AT&T for local and LD. But I'm having similar issues with the Premier side of things and so far I haven't been able to get that fixed. My issue is that the login they gave me doesn't work and when I call support to try to get help, I get some fool who doesn't even know what a TCM is much less how to reset the password. I literally hate companies like this where you as a customer have to spend hours on the phone for something that should be a minor issue and you can't even get competent service. I'm convinced that they hire the absolute dumbest people they can find to man their phones. It's so very frustrating!JackWed, 01 Oct 2008 11:24:41 -0000