The Sovereign State of AT&T
When I was in college and studying Latin American political history, we were reviewing the recent political changes in Chile. While a small country, Chile was symbolic because it was very much an isolated country on the far side of the world. In the days before the Panama Canal, anything on the Pacific side of the Andes was a long way from home and if you went th Chile, unlike someplace like Argentina, you were pretty much there for the duration. It was almost like a developing country in microcosm. It was politically what a place like Galapagos was to naturalists…a place that acted like a terrarium. Salvador Allende, a communist, got himself elected and then the disapproving right wing of the country directly aided by the military, effected a coup d’etas, killing Allende and his family and installing General Augusto Pinochet into the presidency as a “benign” dictator. Who knows what did or didn’t happen to cause that overthrow and the resulting terror inflicted on the young activists of the country, who mysteriously and regularly disappeared into the dark night of oblivion. The book I was assigned to read was The Sovereign State of ITT, written by Anthony Sampson and laying out the proposition that the coup was the direct result of the CIA through the good offices of ITT, whose vested interests were reestablished by Pinochet after having been expropriated by Allende. Imagine my surprise when, after business school, I went to New York and found my new employer, Bankers Trust Company, was a leading bank to ITT, whose offices were just up Park Avenue from us.
I grew up with ITT and it’s spawning parent, AT&T, as the two pillars of American and Global telecommunications. The Antitrust case against AT&T and its oligopoly was the litigation of the century, right up there with the break-up of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. In the trust and pension business (we were Bankers TRUST after all), the AT&T break-up into Mama AT&T and the Baby Bells in 1984 was like the birth of Christ. There was BC and AD or pre and post break-up. In other words, I always thought the world revolved around AT&T. Along the way I even had a classmate from Cornell get the post as CEO of AT&T Wireless and that seemed like a big deal until he went to run Sprint before SoftBank bought them. But in the last few years with the fading of land lines and the rise of Verizon Wireless, AT&T is starting to look like the old town drunk who still has a few bucks, but just wanders aimlessly here and there. First they bought DirectTV and then they sold DirectTV (or are trying to). They say nothing goes right when your underwear’s tight and AT&T must have its jockey shorts wedged up there backside like a nerdy summer camper.
I used AT&T for long distance service for my house in Ithaca. I kept it because it was my only source of WiFi in the house since the DSL line was the only substitute for the non-existent cable service. A good cultural question to ask these days is “what’s dumber than having a land line?” And the correct answer is, “having a land line, a long-distance provider that charges you AND a DSL line that only delivers 1mp of bandwidth.” When I cancelled my land line there and the long-underused and unnecessary long distance service, I also killed the DSL (actually the AT&T guy told me I could no longer have the service since they were phasing it out). Luckily, I found a way to get cable. But there was the issue of the DirectTV (which meant dealing with AT&T), but I found that with the cable-driven WiFi and an AppleTV box, I could get 95% of what I needed and 100% of what my kids needed on the TV, so out went Direct TV (though the dish is still on the roof).
Yesterday I got my monthly email from AT&T telling me there were auto paying my bill for $88.49. I was killing time at my NYC hotel while Kim was off partying with her cabaret friends. I thought, wait a minute, my DirectTV for my primary home on the hill (still used for three of the five TV’s in the house) is $250 per month plus pay-per-views. So, I looked at the bill details and found that the $88.49 was for an iPad Pro with a number that did not match the number on my iPad. So, I called AT&T at the customer service number on the bill. After talking to literally twelve service representatives located in the U.S. and various places in Asia, getting passed form AT&T DirectTV reps to AT&T Wireless reps and finally to AT&T Wireless Cancellation reps, I landed on a Cancellation supervisor who told me she could not help me cancel this unneeded and unused service for which I was paying and had been paying for some time for some unknown reason. We all have microbill clutter on our accounts, but $88.49 is not so micro. She explained that I could not cancel my service unless I had the account password, which was a 4-10 digit number that had been auto-generated by the AT&T security system. That meant that they had sent the password to the cellular number that I was paying for on an iPad that I didn’t have and that had seen no usage for as far back as my records go. She said I could only resolve this by going to an AT&T store.
After doing my best to scare her that I was bringing suit against AT&T and had recorded our call and that she was an accomplice to an intricate commercial fraud scheme, I told her I could not go to a store because I was COVID vulnerable. I figure a lie to thieves and fraudsters is no lie, or at least, as some might say, a good lie. After tiring of that game (I wasn’t recording nor did I take down her name for any lawsuit that I would never initiate), I had a half hour before we were to leave and I Googled the nearest AT&T store. There was one a mere block away (a benefit to being in lower Manhattan), so I went over. There I met Wallace, who had a nice Afro-bun and an AT&T logo tattooed on his right hand. He told me he lost a bet and would deal with it if he ever left there employ. He listened to my story and got incensed on my behalf, an emotion I had failed to generate in any of the twelve reps and supervisors on the phone. He then told me he was not allowed to do any cancellations and that no one was allowed to do so at the store…and the manager wasn’t there (to which he rolled his eyes knowingly). He then suggested I call the cancellation service rep area again, which I did. He heard her say they could do nothing without the password.
I thought I was at the end of this Catch-22 road. Then Wallace said he thought he could change my password for me. He took my license and scanned it into his system to prove that I was me and then he let me put in a new password that I would remember henceforth. It worked. And the cancellation rep immediately said she should now get into the account and cancel my service. While we waited for her protocol to finish, Wallace gave me a flyer for the new DirectTV streaming service. The same service I pay $250/month for my hilltop satellite service, I could now have via my 900 Mp Cox Wifi for $139/month. I fist bumped Wallace and once I change over, I will call his store and find a way to ApplePay him a reward for saying me $200/month for the foreseeable future. As I walked out of the store, the cancellation rep was wrapping up and asked me one last question, “Did I want to upgrade the service on the line I was cancelling because I never had it and put it on another device?” Time to short the sovereign state of AT&T.