AT&T to Cingular Xfer from Hell
Here's a little horror story about my switching carriers from AT&T to Cingular for you. So as many of you know, last Friday I ordered my Treo 650 and decided to switch my service from AT&T to Cingular. For all intents and purposes, you would think this would be a fairly straight forward process. Well guess again. On Friday it took me 1.5 hours on the phone with my AT&T Business rep to get a simple order processed. Although AT&T and Cingular have merged their networks, apparently you need to pick one or the other because if you choose to stay with AT&T, that phone will be locked to the AT&T Network, and won't work on Cingular. Yeah, you heard me. What the hell is that all about? And if you want to get an unlocked phone from PalmOne direct, you can do so for a cool $699. Look man, the phone kicks ass, but not $700 worth of ass.
So after crunching some numbers, the Cingular plan was by far a better choice than anything AT&T had in their list of plans. The real kicker was the Media Works data plan for $19.99 a month. It basically gives you unlimited data on the Treo so you won't get killed when downloading all that email and surfing the WAP sites on that snappy new Edge network. As of the moment, it is the best deal going from all carriers from when taking speed and features into consideration. Keep in mind this is not the same thing as their Data plans which will let you use the phone as a modem to connect to the internet. The phone (after rebate) comes to $399. Now the interesting part will be to see if I can scam the 45% discount on the phone after I get it. More on that in a minute...
So fast forward to Monday. I call AT&T to get status on the order. All of a sudden, the order can't be found in the system. The nice girl looked and looked, but nada. So she started a new order and we went through the whole schpeal again. Another hour wasted answering questions all over again. This time she GUARANTEED me it was in the system. So I get order conf. #2. All looks good in Treo-land.
So today I get home and low and behold, there is my new Treo 650! I was like a kid at Xmas. Then I opened the box, only to find that the phone was packed with an AT&T SIM Card and issued a new phone # instead of porting my old #. Now I don't understand what the heck went wrong here. My sales rep was VERY clear that I wanted to switch over to Cingular, but somehow my order was processed completely different than was intended. So I call AT&T again, and find out that the order that arrived today was the original order from FRIDAY. WTF! Ok, now I am getting pissed. We pull up the order from Monday, and that is in the system, but hasn't shipped. And to make matters worse, the 2nd order was also configured the same as the first, and it would have shipped with an AT&T phone/SIM!!! Blood pressure was starting to cook, lemme tell ya.
OK. So now I am looking at this phone, all giddy and ready to activate it, but something was feeling very wrong in my gut. I had the rep check a few things for me and sure enough, the SIM card was indeed registered under the AT&T network, and you guessed it, the Treo 650 was also an AT&T phone with their ROM. Guess what? I was FSCKED. Now mind you, this is AFTER I had already been on the phone with this lady for 45 minutes getting the billing figured out because I was supposed to be charged $449 and got billed almost $600!!! Forget about the fact that because I am under a business contract, I get 45% off on new phone upgrades (which later I found out that it conveniently doesn't cover data devices such as the Treo). So after an hour on the phone with her, I get this lady to issue me a credit for the 45% and the total price of the phone was now $301. I was happy, until I found out the phone was useless.
Fast forward to yet another rep. By now I have been trying to order this phone for over 5 hours between Friday and today. So they xfer me to yet another rep, this time, someone who pulled out the big guns. This kid knew what he was doing (or so it seems so far). He told me about how they just changed the order form AGAIN and things have changed. Mind you folks, this damn phone hasn't been on the market a week and the order process has changed a couple times already. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and ALL AT&T to Cingular conversions are being done MANUALLY by a HUMAN!!!!!!! All the crap that the AT&T reps are filling out, has to be processed by a person, instead of it being automated into their systems.
So I finally get my order squared away with this kid, but I end up hosed again. He breaks the news about how I can't get my 45% discount on the phone. He was nice enough to give me a $60 credit. So now I will submit the rebate (form is online) as well and see if I can scam another $50 as advertised. He also gave me a $16 credit for get this.....Cingular charges a fee for transferring AT&T customer to Cingular! WTF!!!! Now I have heard of some stupid crap, but this takes the cake. They want all the AT&T folks to renew their plans and convert to Cingualr (no doubt to get them on 1 damn provisioning / billing system), but they wanna charge the customer to do it? Man, corporate America needs to wake the hell up and get a friggin reality check.
So here I am, staring at a nice new shiny Treo 650 that is completely teasing me and screaming a big FU at me. That just aint right. Let's see how long it will take to get the new one and if they get the order right this time. So far, total time wasted on this is 6 hours. Lets see....6 hours billed at my hourly rate of $125, looks like Cingular should be paying ME to switch damnit!!!!
