Media in the New Millennium

posted by Doyle

For those of you who read my rants here or follow me on Twitter, you know I’m not a big United Airlines fan.

AT&T may have topped them in the last 24 hours.

The saga begins when I made the mistake of trying to buy a 3G card for my MacBook Pro. Seems simple. Bought it, found the software for a Mac (PC software comes pre-loaded on the device… isn’t AT&T the exclusive provider of the APPLE iPhone?). Anyway…

Bottom line: it won’t work on the Mac. AT&T Customer Service tells me to take my laptop back to the AT&T Store. They try another card. Nope. They tell me “none of us really know much about Macs.” Um, thanks. (Again, APPLE iPhone. Hello?) They let me call Customer Service from a counter at the back of the store. 10 minutes later, I’m cut off while being transferred. Great. To their credit, they call me back. Another 10 minutes on hold. Finally give up.

Now it gets good. I’ve included a few classic quotes from AT&T folks in the story below, and yes, they’re QUOTES!

I call tech support from my office. I’m put through all the things I’ve already tried — like rebooting! Wow! Wouldn’t have thought of that on my own. Thanks! — and am finally told, “This software really isn’t our product, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

That’s funny, I could have SWORN I paid AT&T for this card. If you choose to use third-party software to support it rather than developing your own, OK, but that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility to your customers.

Then AT&T offers to transfer me to Apple. I’m thinking, wow, they’ve got a line to Apple. That’s great. Now we’ll get somewhere — AT&T must have an agreement with Apple to support issues like this.

Um, no.

What they did was just transfer to Apple’s Customer Service Line. Seriously! Yes, my MacBook Pro is past the date for live support. I knew that. Apple knows that. So, the Apple guy and I had a brief chat about what a tool the AT&T person was, and ended up having a good laugh.

But I didn’t think this was very funny.

Then a friend found a string on Apple’s support page that said, essentially, same problem, no one could help, so he took the card back.

Finally, some advice I can agree with!

So, I took it back. Can I return it? Sure, no problem… AS LONG AS I PAY A $20 RE-STOCKING FEE.

Oh, hell no. You don’t want to see the scene I’m prepared to make in front of all your festive holiday shoppers, pal.

To Jeff’s credit at the AT&T Store at 29th Street in Boulder, he managed to override that. But, let’s take a minute and think about what AT&T asked poor Jeff to do with a straight face:

• Confirm to a customer that, yes, we sold you that and, no, they really don’t work with Macs.
• Understand that I told the guy who sold it to me that I was using it with a Mac, but he didn’t know it didn’t work with Macs.
• Realize that he is asked to tell people all the time that “you’ve got 30 days to bring it back if you don’t like it” when in his heart, he knows they’ll get cracked $20 if they actually do bring it back.
• Finally, tell me that AT&T was going to thank me personally for wasting a couple of hours of my life by charging me $20.

Poor Jeff. Seriously. He knew it was complete bullshit.

Why doesn’t AT&T management know it’s bullshit? They do. That’s why Jeff had a back door to override it. They just plan on a bunch of members of the herd to raise less hell than I was willing to raise. Pretty crappy way to treat your livelihood if you ask me.

So, as Sarah Silverman would say, “What did we learn today?” I learned:

• Despite the fact that they are the exclusive carrier of Apple’s iPhone, they don’t know crap about Macs and were almost irritated by the fact I had one. (Another great AT&T quote: “Not that many people use Macs.” Bet Steve Jobs would love to hear you say that!)
• Rather than just charge what they need to in order to be profitable, AT&T will gouge you at every turn.
• AT&T must hate it’s employees. Why? Because to a person today, everyone I spoke to seemed to really want to help, but AT&T didn’t give them either the tools, the training or the authority to help me out. That’s not the employees’ fault… it’s AT&T’s fault. Shame on them. What a crappy place to work.

And Steve Jobs? Shame on you, too. My customer experience with Apple is first-class, without exception. Let carriers compete with service to carry your phone. Don’t lock in to what I can only believe was a nice payout to Apple at the expense of those of us who really, really like your hardware.

So I’m back on my Sprint card, and I’m pretty happy. Just wondering who to send the invoice for a few hours of my time to at AT&T…

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