I'm recovering from being sick for the last five days (right before Christmas no less) and am not, amazingly, in the best of moods. I got an AT&T bill for the DSL/Phone/DishTV and a day later got a past due notice. This got me angry, not because it was past due, but because I thought I had set it up so that AT&T would be debiting my checking account every month. I do this because, honestly, neither our mail or I am that good at deadlines. I do it with my student loans, with my other loans, with my health insurance, with all kinds of other things. Most folks are happy to have an auto payment in their systems.
So, I called AT&T to pay the past due balance and to see if we can straighten out why my auto-debit is not auto-debiting. Payment is easy, but then we get to the part of things that made me realize that, as far as AT&T is concerned, "customer service" is some strange thing that other companies do.
First, I find that I can't authorize a checking account debit over the phone, to debit my checking account they have to send me a form which I have to sign and send back to them. Mind you, I've set up several other checking account debits without needing to resort to a signed form, but AT&T cannot do that. Their system will not let them it seems. I can however, use a credit card over the phone and set up a monthly debit to my credit card. I have a credit/debit card so this works also. That's when we get to the second instance regarding AT&T's lack of customer service.
After the operator reads through thrity seconds or so of the things I agree to as far as a monthly credit card hit, I asked for one simple thing. I asked that the payment be run on a day between the 15th of the month and the 30th of the month. Complicated huh?
AT&T can't do that; not while doing an auto debit. Say what? It seems the "systems aren't compatible." They can adjust the payment date by up to ten days or they can start to auto debit, but not both.
So you understand why this is important, you need to know that I get paid twice a month on the 15th and on the end of the month. In the first half of the month, I have my student loan, my other loan, and my health insurance coming out of my account. I don't have any play in the first half of the month. I need to pay AT&T the second half of the month. Apparently, AT&T can't help me do that. You would think that it would be a simple software
matter to change the payment date, wouldn't you? Not for AT&T. So, I had to tell AT&T to forget it and that I would continue to pay bills the old fashion way. At least I know handling paper is more expensive for them so, in my own small way, their action helps me hurt them, just a little bit. I'd hurt them more, mind you, if I wasn't under a three year obligation for their services. However, in three years they are likely going to lose this customer.
It did get me thinking though about the cop out that computers give petty bureaucrats. AT&T's reason here was because their systems weren't compatible. That translates to, "The computer won't let me do that." I've heard that before. I got in an argument with an associate circuit clerk once because I had a statute that said I could file something and I had a clerk who would not file it because her computer software did not have a category for it. She told me she could not file it because the computer would not let her. She expected that to decisively end the argument; after all she had to take no responsibility for what the computer wouldn't do. I bit back a reply that my computer said she had to do this and simply pointed out the statute that said they had to file this to the circuit clerk. He made it work somehow.
Which brings me back to AT&T. To AT&T: I don't give a damn if the systems are not compatible. You are the computer OPERATOR and the company who PROGRAMS YOUR systems. The computers do what YOU tell them to do and if there is something they don't do, it is because YOU are not telling them to do it. Don't give me an abstract "The systems are not compatible" line of crap when what you mean is "We haven't bothered to tell our computer how to do this and you, the customer, and your needs are not important enough to us for us to get off our billion dollar ass to accommodate your fairly innocuous request, so piss off and do it our way like a good drone."
You control you computers; they do not control you.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It did get me thinking though about the cop out that computers give petty bureaucrats. AT&T's reason here was because their systems weren't compatible. That translates to, "The computer won't let me do that."
Yeah; this is a been a pet peeve of mine for years. It's not just bureaucrats either; anybody who doesn't want to expend the mental energy to come up with a reason to say "no".
As far as AT&T themselves, I'd be willing to bet that the real reason is an accounting one. They may not want their accounts changing for incoming debits the last half of the month, which may make end-of-month balance statements easier to construct.
But that doesn't excuse their bullshit answer to your request. "The Computer" (by which they mean their software accounting system running on their computer, but never mind) doesn't determine policy, it is an instrument of someone else's policy.
I suppose the reason that people do this is because if you say "the computer can't do it", then there's no one higher up the chain to yell at.
Post a Comment