Friday, October 22, 2010

Dear AT&T.....

Let me put this as sweetly as I can.

If you quarter-witted marketing whizzes* don't stop trying to shove your damnable cable-TV-like service down my throat, I'm gonna cancel every last blasted service I get from you.

Seriously, I've seen your 'verse. I don't like it.

You're already the providers of my landline, cell phone and high-speed DSL, which by my count is at least one and possibly three services too many. Even if I liked the silly-ijit-box channels you want to sell me in a degree of rez and compression that hurts my eyes, I would be disinclined to hand any company a total monopoly over my media access, and especially not to AT&T, the "we spy on customers for the Feds" outfit.

There's no tellin' how many forests you have hewn down, how much oil, carbon black and aniline you've slathered onto thick, high-zoot chrome-coat paper in a futile attempt to sell me on a service I don't want, couldn't afford and would not, in any case, care to lease from you.

Y'all leave me alone and cease stoppin' up my mailbox with that crap. When I call in to pay my bill or ask howcome my cell phone service is so blamed spotty, I do not want a sales pitch for the dubious and tawdry wonders of your flavor of cable TV.

It's souring me on your company. And I was already lightin' up litmus strips that way.

Look, I need you for tip & ring POTS, 'cos I like old phones and you are the primo guys for that DC & dialtone jazz; after all, you invented it, or maybe snatched it out from under Elisha Gray. The other services, they sell on streetcorners, often nicer than the versions you offer.

So back off. I'll toss ya out and make my own dialtone if you keep pushing.

No amount of marketing can sell a service the customer does not want and even finds loathsome. But it'll lose you customers, toot de sweet.

Slimeballs.
__________________________________
* As in "whizzing" or "to have a whiz." And I don't mean speedy motion.

6 comments:

rickn8or said...

I thought it was just me that didn't care for AT&T's insistence I needed their TeeWee service.

But you said it better.

Why watch the idjit box when we got the blogosphere??

Anonymous said...

What rickn8or said. There is very little on TV that is worth watching, which won't end up on the internet one way or the other.

Besides, blogging is far better mental exercise.

Jim

Jeffro said...

Choices here are pretty much non existent - there is one phone company that delivers DSL and that's it. TV? OTA or satellite - which is ok by me.

Verizon (and Alltel before them) keep trying to push an aircard "so I can save money by dropping the phone and internet."

This, where my cell service is so bad that I have to step out on the porch to get a signal, or drive down the road a mile to have a two or three minute conversation before getting dropped. Downloads on my smartphone often never finish.

So, I tell the nice salesperson that I'll take that service if we can do a test run: if we can have a ten minute continuous cell conversation, I'll buy the modem and pay for the service. Otherwise, it's free to me.

Oddly enough, they've never taken me up on that offer, nor do they bother me any more.

Bubblehead Les. said...

Helpful Hints:

A) Go to wwwWorldPrivacyForum.org, look at the Top Ten Opt Out List and see what you want shut off.
B) See if you can get on the "Do Not Call" list. Unfortunately, it doesn't apply to Non-Profits, "Political Advertising", and companies you do business with.
C) Diversify your inputs. For example, our landline is AT+T (city contract, no escape, but we like having POTS), our cells are on Sprint w/ our Long Distance (but we're switching to another carrier when our contract is up), our TV comes from Direct, and our Internet is from Time/Warner.

This enables us to play off one against the other, and keeps us from putting all our eggs in one basket.

Hope this helps.

Old Grouch said...

What with the proliferation of residential "do not call" regulations, my AT&T gripe has become their unceasing telephone harass^H^H^H marketing to small businesses. My co. has had no relationship with AT&T for years (went with an alternate vendor long time ago), but we still get periodic spates of calls from multiple AT&T "providers" wanting to talk to "the person in charge of the AT&T account." Total waste of time.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

AT&T, isn't that the landline service? You mean they sell cell phones and cable TV, too? And connections to the innertubes?

What hath God wrought?

</sarcasm>

In my neighborhood, the only game in town for high-speed internet is Comcast, even though there are several AT&T VRADs within a couple of blocks of the house.

And having been their customer for five years after being an AT&T DSL customer at the old place, I have to say that I've had less trouble with Comcast than I ever had with AT&T...