Gophones are great. 10 cents a call, 100.00 a year. We were paying big for phone connectivity, mostly for phones to let us locate each other in a supermarket.

OTOH, AT&T conducts psychological warfare against go-phone users: it has 4 layers of bots, some of them that loop, and some of which deliver you to live (but dead black screens with no sound which really do produce a voice now and again telling you to stay on the line, before they finally drop the call and you have to re-dial.)

Speaking Latin to some bots will get you to customer service, when repeatedly hitting 0 only prompts the bot to hang up. “Gallia est omnis divisa” is a phrase that confuses them.

But if you get a regular rep, they will tell you they are fixing things, but they don’t stay fixed. To get at that level usually involves a supervisor, who will still screw things up. My problem took two hours on the phone and involved my ‘automatic’ renewal account, in which they are supposed to charge your account 102.00 and set you right for another year. Yet—I get bot messages on my computer that says it’s going to expire and I have to manually refill it. So–I got a supervisor to assure me she had fixed that problem and the thing would automatically refill. Wrong: I got a phone text saying refill had ‘failed.’ Second go at the phone. Another hour, and finally another supervisor who got an earful, and manually put the charge through. It took.

Then today—JANE’S phone ran out, despite the automatic refill order. Another hour getting through the bots to a person, who said HER automatic payment had ‘failed.’ Well, guess what: we got online with our CC company, who assured us there’s nothing wrong with her account either—it’s AT&T not sending the proper request to the CC company, ie, routine practice for every corporation on the planet when it wants to get paid. HER help at AT&T is investigating and will ‘call her back.’ Meanwhile she has the transcript from the card company printed out and is ready to read AT*T the riot act.

Are we pissed? Yea, verily. Jane’s situation still isn’t settled, but I detect a common thread of ‘failed’ when it comes to AT&T sending proper request for autopayment to a credit card company. Can you say MASSIVE FAIL here?

And we remembered when I got sick, we hadn’t turned off our Ipad data plan. Also AT&T. Groan. Then in a call to our store I obtained the holy grail—a salesman where we got our Ipad told us the direct number the salesmen use for AT&T, which only goes through ONE bot, and if you select item two and speak Latin to it, you get a pass through to a live agent, taking only about 15 minutes to find out that the salesman who told us we always had to come in or phone in to reinstate the data plan probably wanted to log a customer contact —we found out you can buy or or turn off a plan automatically from the Settings screen in the Ipad. So that, at least, is handled.

Jane’s still waiting for the guy from AT&T to call her back.

I wonder how many millions of computer charges have now bounced back on AT&T because one of their bots has screwed up?

THE phone company in the USofA — and who has the most screwed-up phone system in the country? Oh, yeah……..