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I have been with Cingular/AT&T Wireless for about two years now and have never had any problems with them besides their service black hole in my girlfriend’s apartment. It is interesting though that I have suddenly run into a bunch of problems with them all at once.

This most recent weekend I found that all incoming calls were going straight to my voicemail. They weren’t ringing on the caller’s end, and my phone wasn’t ringing either. Even worse, my phone was not being notified about these missed calls or new voicemails in my inbox. I also could not receive text messages.

Initially I tried to troubleshoot the phone on my own by turning it off and then turning it back on again. This did not seem to help at all. My next course of action was to call the people at AT&T to see if they had any solutions. After spending about three minutes navigating the phone tree, I found out that I had to call from a different phone in order for them to troubleshoot my cell. Since my lunch break was almost over, I decided that I would just have to bring it in to my good friends at the local AT&T store.

When I brought in my phone, the AT&T rep initially powered down the phone and restarted it like I had and then tried calling it. No luck. Then he decided that it must be something with the SIM card. He popped open my phone and pulled out the SIM card. He left and then came out with a brand new SIM card. He put the two cards into this machine that looked very similar to a calculator and transferred the data from one SIM card to the other. After this he put the new SIM card in my phone and powered it back on. He gave my phone a call and it magically started ringing again.

Thanks AT&T!

As a final side note, they did not even charge me for the new SIM card.

So today my girlfriend and I went to the AT&T store at the local mall and inquired about the fee that had been assessed on my account. For those of you who don’t remember, I was charged an $18 “change of account responsibility fee.” The fee seemed pretty ridiculous, especially since we were not informed of this prior to making the switch. The AT&T customer representative went back and presumably talked to the manager to get the go-ahead and came back a few minutes later. She said that I would receive a credit to my account either on this bill or the next bill. She said that she had to send an email out to make it effective. Hopefully this low-tech way of applying a credit to my account actually goes through, or else I will have to make yet another trip down to the store.

So the customer may not always be right, but I guess in this case they are. So if you get charged with this totally out of line fee, please make your way down to your local AT&T store to right their wrongs.

I normally don’t use this blog to rant about a company, but AT&T wireless especially pissed me off today. For the past few months my girlfriend of about 2 1/2 years have been thinking about switching her phone over from her dad’s family plan to a family plan with me. It just seemed to make sense for us, especially since I don’t go through a ton of minutes and she was sharing hers with three other people on her old one. So just last week we went into AT&T to get everything moved over.

It seemed like a pretty painless process. All in all it took about five minutes. They checked all of our IDs and got our numbers and then transferred her number over to my plan and set us up with a new minutes plan. It all sounds good until I took a look at my bill this morning.

Apparently AT&T charges what they refer to as a “Transfer of Service Responsibility Fee” which costs $18.00! $18.00 to move a number on a computer from one account to another. No credit or background checks needed to be done, just a straight transfer! It seems like they should be encouraging you to sign up with the family plan since you will most likely keep your service there longer. Instead they just penalize you! Rediculous! I wonder if they charged her dad as well?

One more thing that made me pretty upset was that they got rid of almost all of my rollover minutes. Over the past 12 months I had accumulated over 3,000 rollover minutes. When I switched over to the family plan they took away all of those minutes except for 700. What happened to keep the minutes that you pay for?

The account summaries that are posted along with this article are taken from my actual bill, so I am not making this stuff up. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences with AT&T and whether or not this is standard practice on the other wireless carriers.