Surprise!

I'd like to think that, in general, I'm a pretty good sport. I don't believe in the type of practical joke that destroys property or actually harms people, and if I'd been on the jury in the case where some idiot decided to give someone with a severe peanut allergy something containing peanut butter, I would have been voting for conviction for Murder in the Second Degree (under the Depraved Indifference statute) -- that's not funny. But in general I'll put up with most things, and I think I'm relatively good at laughing when the joke is on me. Or, at least, I did think so until we got our most recent cellular telephone bill...

Now, it's important to realize that my wife and I didn't set out to become AT&T customers in the first place; we had quit AT&T years ago because of their substandard service and baffling billing and gone with Cingular, only to end up back with AT&T when they bought Cingular out from under us. We were about to switch to another provider when AT&T bought them, too, and in an effort to keep anyone else from losing their jobs (or their companies) as a result of AT&T pursuing us, we just gave up. Fortunately, the influx of personnel from all of these other companies seems to have been a good influence on the AT&T core personnel, and their service and performance have been improving over the past few years. And the fact that they are nation-wide comes in handy when we travel, which is a good thing when you are relocating across the country...

So imagine our surprise when our first bill arrives in East Lansing for more than 3.5 times what we had been paying, more than half of it in "roaming charges." Fortunately for us, there's an AT&T Wireless store less than a mile from our new house, and we went down there the following day to ask just what in heaven's name was going on. This proved to be rather more involved than we had expected, because the people at the store didn't know either. In fact, when we showed them the bill they appeared to be as appalled as we had been ourselves; they agreed that they're a nationwide company and none of their current contracts include roaming charges. They had to get on the phone and call their own corporate customer service to try to find out what was going on. Which, of course, we could have done ourselves, but were hoping to avoid by just showing up in person and asking our question...

So we watched the AT&T guys sit on their own voicemail system and listen to their own recorded voice telling them how important their call was, a somewhat surreal experience that would have been a lot funnier under other circumstances, but wasn't bad even so. After a few whiles, they were able to determine that despite changing our coverage four times, our phones three times and our address twice, the computer still had us on our original Cingular calling plan, even though they'd been billing us under an AT&T plan (and rates) for at least 4 years at this point. Our original rate plan hadn't been with a nationwide network, as there were no such things in 2001, and had thus included roaming charges. No one present, including the person from Bangalore who was on the telephone with us, had ever seen such a thing before...

Our story may end well, however. The AT&T guys agreed to back all of the roaming charges off of our account and make sure that we don't have any more of them. They also transferred us to a cheaper calling plan that will bring our monthly bill back into a reasonable level, and explained how to go about exchanging our California telephone numbers for local ones (which we'll probably do next month after making sure that everyone had our new land-line number here in Michigan). I can't fault the AT&T guys at the AT&T store; they were handed a potato that was not merely hot but was in fact (metaphorically) radioactive, and they handled it with dignity and professionalism. Even the call center agent from Bangalore was very nice and helpful...

But I'd still urge any of you who are thinking about relocating or even extended travel to go check on your calling plan before setting out on your journey...