Fri, December 3, 2004

There's this little thing that I know absolutely nothing about called local toll service. I have to deal with it because I live in Los Angeles and the city is so big and sprawling that certain local telephone calls actually fall under local toll calling, and so I have to have a local toll plan with my phone. (The only reason I have a phone line is so I can plug it into TiVo, so this should all be moot. But since I have the line anyway, I tend to plug my phone into it, and I tend to use that phone to make local calls. God forbid I should try to check movie showtimes in Burbank one day and – without local toll service protection – spend 45¢ a minute to listen to a scratchy, compressed version of the Lemony Snicket trailer. "Ulllltimate Dad. xkcckkhk")

When I moved into my current apartment a couple of years ago, I didn't have long distance or local toll service. Then, at some point, someone told me I had to add it, so I added it with AT&T. Pacific Bell (now SBC Pacific Bell, or possibly just SBC, I can't keep up) handles my phone line, so they really wanted to handle my long distance and local toll service, but I said no. I prefer AT&T because I'm still heartbroken that AT&T got busted up back in the '80s – I don't really know why; it's certainly counter to most of my views on privatization and deregulation. I guess it's mostly because before the divestiture, you didn't have anyone calling you at mealtime to suggest changing long distance plans. (Plus Pacific Bell is the workplace that "Dilbert" is based on, so they must be terrible, right?) AT&T also had a cheaper option, which was important because I don't make long distance calls on my home phone so I didn't want to pay a lot for the right to do it.

For many months, it seemed like I never really got a bill from AT&T. They'd bill me for like $1.36 or something, for times I'd get lazy and make a long distance call from the home phone. One time they billed me for 14¢, but their website can't process credit card payments of less than a dollar, so I operated with a credit balance for months.

Lately, though, they've billed me for like seven dollars like three months in a row. That doesn't seem right. I don't even want the service! So, I investigated and found out I was paying a minimum $5 charge for the 5¢ weekends plan, which was applied against any calls I made. So, I could either talk for 500 weekend minutes or not, I was paying the same price. I'm assuming this just kicked in recently, because I swear I don't remember getting bills like these, but anyway, it had to go. I don't make 1 minute of weekend calls – I'm not going to pay for 500!

A few minutes poking around AT&T's slow, clunky website and Pacific Bell's slower, clunkier website revealed that I could get local toll and long distance coverage added to my existing Pacific Bell bill for no additional charge. The catch was that I'd pay 10¢ a minute for long distance calls. That's fine, I don't make them. But, AT&T, in that way that companies love to do, won't let you cancel service online.

This is hilarious to me because, if anything, placing obstacles in the way of my cancellation is only going to make me more certain that I want to terminate my relationship with a company. I'm not going to get weary and give up! This is like the websites like Sallie Mae and Statusfactory that impose an arbitrary password change every few months. It becomes so tiresome because I have good passwords and I take care of them, why should I be penalized because of dopes who use easily guessable passwords? The key to passwords is to have a handful that you use a lot, otherwise there are so many to remember that you end up writing them down, defeating the whole purpose. With Statusfactory I have to change my password every six months, so I just change it to something random and change it right back. Sallie Mae won't allow you to use any password you've ever used before, so now I use something stupid like "salliemae9" and just put it on a post-it next to my computer screen. Nice work, guys! Why not just make things easier on your customers? Maybe they'll love you for it and spend more money with you.

Anyway, as I said, I had to call AT&T in order to cancel. I figured I'd call AT&T, bail, then call PacBell and add the services I needed, plus drop a stupid $3/month feature they have called WirePro, which means they come out and fix your phone lines for free if anything's busted. That's the kind of thing you need for the first month in a new place, until TiVo's plugged in and working and the DSL guy has come and gone, and then you move on.

So, I called AT&T, expecting plenty of hassles. For some reasons, long distance providers are in that group of companies that go crazy trying to stop you from leaving them. Some credit cards are this way, too. They're making $7 a month off me – it seems hardly worth putting up a fuss. But they have a script all ready. AOL has entire multi-story buildings with their own unique lingo and culture devoted just to keeping people from canceling their service. (I learned all about the Saves floor, Save Coaches, Save Rates and – most hilarious of all – Retention Buddy in this hilarious memo from the OKC Saves center.)

After about ten minutes of hold time, someone picked up. (I pondered how much time is wasted by forcing everyone who simply wants to cancel service to call them on the phone. They could reduce hold times a lot by just letting me cancel online.) It was clear that he was in India, being paid to sound casually American. My first time! This was exciting. The most impressive thing, right off the bat, was that he said, "I see you're calling about 323-937-xxxx." I really hate it when you have to punch in an account number to the automated system and the first thing the person says when he picks up is, "So, ah... what's your account number, Mac?" We went through the usual rigamarole of him asking me what I was paying with Pacific Bell and then offering me a bunch of weird services I didn't want. I kind of played along, being a lot more patient than usual because I was trying to avoid making another call that I was supposed to make this morning. His script was really tedious, though. He kept repeating things back to me. I said "No, thanks" to a few offers and then the hard sell started. What about this? What about that? I guess it was because I sounded interested at first, so he thought he might have a live one. We kept comparing plans and nothing ever came out that was better than PacBell so he put me on hold to "process the cancellation request." What he really did was look at the amount of time he'd already spent with me and realize if he didn't convert this into a save, he'd be out on the street polishing nickels for pennies before the noonday sun hit the polished tiles of Agrabah. So, he went and got a secret deal from a manager and came back with a plan that matched exactly what I have with PacBell, added call waiting, and cost $3 less. So, I said okay.

Kind of like buying a car. You have to be ready to walk away at any time. I think it also helped that I played along at the start. He was more motivated to convert this baby. Then, I got to talk to Tina, from a third-party verification company, whose job it was to check that I really wanted to switch to AT&T. I guess there have actually been problems with that. She probably works for one of few companies that really celebrate the divestiture. I hung up: the call timer on my phone said 37 minutes. Wow.

Then I remembered that I was planning to drop WirePro from PacBell, so I should've deducted $2.99 plus tax from their total. The AT&T plan would actually cost me a few nickels more! But the great thing is this: AT&T is giving me a $25 credit for the first month, which completely covers my first month's bill. So, if I switch back to PacBell in January, I have a month of useless phone service for free, and I get to go through the whole dance again and possibly get an even sweeter deal. After all, PacBell won't be trying to convert $7 into $23, they'll be starting at zero – it's a buyer's market!

In related news, I'll never have that 37 minutes of my life back.

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