AT&T sucks, that’s all that I can say now. Not only that their name servers are kind of broken (resolving is very unreliable and takes forever sometimes), but their customer service is really bad. So I wanted to perform a simple task … change the name of the account holder, i.e., my roommate moved out and I wanted to “take over” phone and internet. I called them on a Friday … 30 minutes and two people on the phone later, I thought everything would be fine. I thought. They told me weird stories that there needs to be an internet downtime of a week in order to change it, but we figured something out that this would not happen (don’t cancel the old account before the new one is “ready”). Should be a standard procedure. My internet connection vanished the following Tuesday *DARN* idiots. Ok, I called them again and they told me that I quit service. Great, I didn’t! I asked them to re-establish it as fast as possible. But hah! I realized that there was no name change at all (the account was still on Matthews name) – but I did not care, I wanted internet back. They told me that they could not post a new order because the old one (the disconnect) was still not finished. WTF! Why does it *FIRST* disconnect me and then processes the order for several days preventing a re-connection *ARGH*. I called them every day and finally, on Thursday, they could post a new order that should be executed by the following Tue (wow, they need 6 days to fix a freaking account). The whole thing was just a matter of giving me a new password. Ok, I waited …. spent the weekend in the lab :-/. Tue evening came and the net was not back … of course … idiots. So I called again. They told me that I need to go to some webpage and that I need Internet Explorer for that. I tried Firefox on Linux and failed because they used some stupid (wrong) JavaScript for the “Next” button on this terrible webpage. Oh man, and the people on the phone were way to stupid to deal with this situation. So I gave up (after 45 minutes) and asked my roommate to borrow his laptop. We logged in and – voila – the button worked. This terrible webpage *FORCED* us to install some Yahoo toolbar stuff thingie. Oh man, AT&T forces you to install stuff you don’t need in order to get IP access. Idiots! It finally worked …. never ever AT&T again.
May132008