I may only have 4 months of business school education and 6 years of work experience, but something about this scenario just seems to scream “ridiculously poor business practice”:

Jan 12th: Lose cell phone in the city by the bay-ay-AY-ay. (After the lights… went down… in the cit-ay)

Jan 14th: Stroll into AT&T Wireless store, drop $200 on a “smart” phone. UPGRADE service to include unlimited data usage. In addition to the $49.99 per month I was being charged for voice services, I’m now going to pay another $29.99 for data services. Does my original voice service stay the same? To quote Joey Tribiani, Supposably….

Jan 21st: After numerous SMS messages over the course of a week are lost in the ether, wait on hold for 40 minutes to speak to a service representative while being assured roughly 90 times that my call is important. When I finally speak to a representative, I’m informed that text messaging is not part of my current plan.

“You’re not signed up for a messaging plan.” Of course not! Why would I be? All I did was give you more money to upgrade! I didn’t explicitly say “don’t take away my text messaging”! Why would text messaging be standard these days anyway? Who doesn’t know that when you add unlimited websurfing, it’s standard practice to turn off text messaging… on a SMART PHONE NO LESS? What kind of fool am I?!?

Well, I’ll tell you what kind of fool - the kind of fool that just upgraded again. “Sure, AT&T, here’s another $10 a month for text messaging. Let me know how I can be of further service for the next two years while I’m stuck in another terrible one-sided contract. By the way, I’m only using one kidney.”

And technology marches on!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 1.52 and is filed under Dubble Yoo Tee Eff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.