The New AT&T, Redux

For those of you that visit regularly, you know that I rearranged all of my communications last month. Or I thought I had.

They switched things around quite nicely; but, all of the fiefdoms in the AT&T family decided to quit billing me. At the same time, they started sending me voicemails asking that I call an 800 number for "important information" about my Cingular/Bellsouth account.

I called the numbers, negotiated through voicemail hell and got to any number of people that had no idea why I had been asked to call.

Yesterday, on the third try, a nice lady at Cingular "now part of the New AT&T" figured it out. I had all of the services "bundled." When they were changed they were "unbundled" and as such, well we don't quite know, they just quit billing me. So I gave her all of the info and she told me to go online and register for Ebills.

I just kind of did. The cellphone bill will now come by Email; but, there is no way to register the wireless internet account with the cellphone account. So I started to create a separate wireless internet Ebill account. As part of the registration, they send you a "temporary password" by text message. Sounds good; but, my laptop has its own phone number. Yeah that didn't make much sense to me either. It turns out that my internet service is really just a "fat pipe" cellphone connection and thus has a phone number. The problem? They sent my text message to my computer. I don't think it gets phone or text messages. I'll see when I get home tonight.

In the meantime no one at Cingular, "part of the New AT&T" has any idea what to do about that.

It is important to point out the idiocy here. Cingular won't/can't make any changes to my Bellsouth accounts. Bellsouth won't deal with Cingular accounts. Bellsouth won't send me just one Email to bill me for my home and business accounts. IT'S ALL ONE COMPANY!