Thanks, AT&T!!!!

I'm not one to make myself out the be the victim of big business sticking it to the little guy, but I believe that one company does, indeed, do this regularly to customers because they can get away with it.

Quite some time ago I asked that my long distance service on my AT&T land line be turned off as I had no use for it. I make long distance calls on my cell phone. Now, it's my fault for not noticing, but they conveniently put it back on some time ago (thanks, AT&T!). So, I called them earlier in the month to have them take it off again. It's a little over $5.00 a month, but every penny counts when you're a single income family. They agreed to turn it off and credit my account for the times that I was charged (per my request--they didn't volunteer to give any of my money back to me). I knew that they wouldn't go all the way back to when they originally stuck it to me, but I was hopeful for at least something.

When I looked at my AT&T bill this month I noticed that they did take the long distance off of my bill. However, they only gave me a credit of $5.00 from the past year or so of being charged and then THEY CHARGED ME $9.15 IN FEES FOR HAVING MY LONG DISTANCE CHANGED/REMOVED!!!!!!!! (thanks, AT&T!) I got on the phone with them today and was able to get it somewhat resolved. The bottom line was that I got $50 credit--big whoop, but at least it's something. The lesson to be learned is that you have to go through every line of every bill and I have not been too good about that in the past. The other lesson to be learned is that big companies will take advantage of people if they can get away with it.

This all reminded me of one of my favorite video clips from The Colbert Report. I don't know if it's legal for me to post this or not, but I'll take a chance (I found it on YouTube). If you're my age, you probably remember that back in the day, AT&T was everything when it came to telephone service. They had taken over all of the other telephone related companies to have their own monopoly. Thankfully (please note my sarcasm here), the Federal Government stepped in and broke up the monopoly. AT&T was split into several different companies. This is also the time when companies like MCI and Sprint came along offering long distance alternatives. That's what was supposed to happen--companies competing against one another to get your business instead of one company having everything and thus the power to charge you whatever they want. So, you can understand the irony when you watch the following video...