So, I have no phone service because they don’t think I’ve paid my bill–since September. This is a great surprise to my checking account, which has seen AT&T cash every check I’ve sent them for the past three months.
I’ve talked to two different people already and I’m now sitting on hold while they try to decide if my “ghost account” is the one who’s been sending me bills.
Possibly. But then, where is that money going? And, why haven’t I gotten a bill from my non-dead account, ever?
I hope they can straighten this out and apply the money to the right account, because I don’t have three months’ worth of money to send them.
Hurray! They seem to have found the money. I’m back on hold.
It’s complicated. Back on hold.
I now am curious about who the woman who does the hold voice-over is. I also wonder how long I could have gone without phone service before I noticed. But you wonder, does she do a lot of hold information or do they just rope one of the more well-spoken operators into it?
The funny thing is that while the person helping me is quietly typing, I can hear the person near her gossiping about what’s for dinner. Italian, in case you’re curious.
It took an hour but I am back in business!!!!
Tiny Cat Pants 
ATT is having issues. Yesterday, my phone was mysteriously all “emergency calls only” for a couple of hours, leading me to have to double-check my records to reach the same conclusion you reached. The problem resolved itself later in the day, so I didn’t have to sit on hold.
to quote a friend from years ago, to a (Bellsouth) now AT&T representative – “I’d use 2 cans and a string before I used your service!!!!”
If only there were some other provider of phone service available in your area.
TheBoyfriend™ and I have a cell-phone only household.
If only there were a cable company whose service was even remotely better than that of the phone company…
Issues is right, Bridgett. I am convinced there is something going bad wrong with AT&T since about August/September. There has been some inexplicable weirdness with all of my bills since around that time. A friend of mine who is not in the South (so therefore not an old BellSouth customer) told me today there were three unexplainable charges on her most recent bill.
My future in-laws, who have had the same number 20+ years or much more, and could pay for many times more phone lines that they have, discovered their phone had been cut off a couple of weeks ago. The bill has been paid by auto-pay for years and there’d been no problem with that. Turned out when they had a second line disconnected a few months ago and requested AT&T put any residual charges on their main phone bill, it wasn’t done & the final bill was mailed to a post office box that rarely gets checked (and thus not paid for a couple of months). Yet AT&T disconnected their main phone number ANYWAY.
But it took them two days to get to the bottom of it because the first day they called, they never could get through to a live person. The second day, it took them most of the day, but they finally did and got it all straightened out.
This has never been par for the course, or at least wasn’t with BellSouth. My last telephone experience regarding problems with my DSL wasn’t too great (and was actually still BellSouth at the time), but this with the in-laws was horrible service. And BellSouth just used to have the most excellent – and usually fairly quick – customer service there was when it came to phoning in regarding trouble.
And now you guys report all this. I just can’t help but wonder are they going bankrupt, are they about to get sold – something? It’s just worrisome how incredibly downhill things seem to be going, which seems to me to have started in about September – which your problem would support as well – when they suddenly announced all this weird restructuring of part of their billing.
Something’s definitely up, I’m convinced. I hope they get their act together soon before a truly viable alternative edges them out. Just ask Comcast how many cable and broadband customers they lost in Memphis within the first few months of arrival here (unfortunately most of the broadband ones jumped to BellSouth).
Sorry Andy & sorry Sarcastro, gotta call those as I see ’em in Memphis anyway…