AT&T SUCKS - Fraudulent Charges

OK, so a few months ago I praised AT&T wireless for some good customer service.

Now I have to blast them for doing something SO wrong that it really borders on criminal.

AT&T, the latest mobile phone company in the world can't tell the time.

It's true. They are unaware that Daylight Saving Time ended last Sunday at 3am.

I know because I use a GoPhone prepaid plan. It costs $3 a day to talk as much as I want. That works perfectly for me because then I can spend under $40 and not worry about how long I talk (I clearly don't use it everyday, they have a new $60 unlimited plan for that).

If you place even one voice call in a day, you are charged the daily rate. This also applies to their $1 a day, 10 cents a minute plan.

Days start at midnight, and end at midnight.

Unless, you're AT&T, and because you're still on Daylight Saving Time, while the rest of the country is not, your day begins at 11pm.

This mean that they are not only shortchanging customers for 1 hour a day (which would be relatively minor), they are charging people for entire days they don't use.

So, let's get this straight--AT&T doesn't know DST has ended? Is that even possible? I know that the end date of DSL changed, but how hard is it to program a new date in their computer?

I wonder how many billions they will take in illegally this way!

So, I called, spend a half hour on the phone while they talked to some tech department--and apparently they knew about it (maybe they figured it out after 956,000 people called to complain), and they're "working on it."

OK, so they know it's a problem. Obviously they should issue refunds. But no. It has to be fixed, then they can send out refunds--if you remember that you're owed one, because then the onus is on you, and not them. I insisted they have somebody call me, but it's been five days and nobody has, I haven't seen a refund for the fraudulent charge, and in fact, it's still a problem because I got charged again Friday night at 11pm.

It's Friday--almost a week after Daylight Saving Time ended. AT&T's clocks are still off by an hour. They are still charging people at 11pm for a new day--which they might not use, because it should start at midnight.

I ask again--how many billions will they earn fraudulently from this "error" and who, if anyone, will ever receive a refund? You certainly won't unless you have a half hour to spend complaining about it. If you earn more than $6 an hour then it really isn't worth your time--but it's the principal of the thing!

And it gets worse--today they also charged me twice for my 200 message package.

They sent me a text message saying my text message package was expiring, and to reply with the letters RNW and they'd renew.

I did.

Nothing happened. No confirmation. No new message package.

Since I was in traffic I decided I'd call because I had nothing else to do for the next 30 minutes. This time I reached one of the most unhelpful customer support people I've ever encountered.

"No, you don't have any new message plans--it's not in the system, we didn't get your text. you need to go back into the IVR (luckily, I knew what an IVR was--Interactive Voice Response--which means the automated system that doesn't require an operator to do things), and order the plan there."

I asked, "So, you're sure I won't be charged twice for this, or get two orders, I only want one package."

"Yes, I'm sure." he said.

"Could you check on the fraudulent charge I received on Monday?" I asked.

"Yes, there's a note here that somebody will call you when the refund is issued." he said.

"When will that be? I mean, it's been five days, shouldn't I have gotten the refund?" I asked, incredulous.

"It could take any amount of time," he said, unhelpfully.

"I have now spend about an hour on this and I want a bigger credit than $3 for my time." I sighed.

"They'll give you a $3 credit," he said, as if this at all responded to what I said (in the past, they have given me bigger credits when they screw up).

And then, after offering no help, and, in fact, giving me misinformation, the representative said, "After this you'll get an email asking you to rate my performance, I hope you'll give me a 5."

I said, "Well, no offense, but you haven't fixed the problem, so I can't give you a 5, the best I can give you is a 3."

"I really wish you would give me a 5," he said, sadly.

I was shocked. this guy didn't do a good job, then wanted to guilt my into giving him a good rating. Perhaps he's not getting good ratings because he's not doing a good job!"

Even so, I said, "Fine, I'll give you a five," but it was a lie--I wasn't going to.

Of course, I also never received a questionnaire about it, so AT&T struck out again.

I called the IVR, ordered 200 messages and had $4.99 deducted from my account.

Then, later, when I was fraudulently charged at 11pm, I noticed that somehow my balance was $5 less than it should be (actually $8 less with the $3 a day charge I shouldn't have be charged). I called 611 and found out I now had 600 SMS messages in my account, which means that AT&T did in fact, give me two orders of 200 messages (I already had 200 in there, but they expire every 30 days--clever of them, huh?)

So now I'd paid almost $10 for SMS messages I only wanted $5 worth of. And I'll have to spend another 30 minutes on the phone, but this time I can complain about $8 worth of bad charges--which makes my hourly rate shoot up to $16 a hour!

AT&T is getting to be like health insurance companies--their service is predicated on the idea that you won't bother to complain when they do something wrong--because it takes too long and is too hard.

With insurance companies, sometimes you start to think, "Well, maybe I'll just pay the $500 myself--even if I can't afford it, because I can't get through to them and it's making me feel sick to my stomach."

Now, though AT&T is playing with much lower figures, they're also making sure it's not worth your while to complain.

That's wrong. Do they not make enough money giving actual service so they now have to charge fraudulently? There's no excuse for this. None.

Oh--and in case you have a GoPhone and want to try to talk to a real person, you call, wait for them to give you your balance, then press 4. Then you can say "REPRESENTATIVE" and they will connect you--unless they're closed (and they close early)

FOLLOW UP: 11/6/09 - Still no refund of payment. Was escalated to a supervisor who was surly and rude from the start, as if I was wasting his time pointing out AT&T's own errors. He then said, "Look, you received two calls on Tuesday so we were right to charge you." Well, first, they weren't right to charge me at 11pm, since they couldn't have magically known I'd get calls later, next--I didn't receive or answer any calls on Tuesday because I don't get cell phone service in my house and I was home--and my own phone's call log shows no calls at all on Tuesday. Those calls weren't there when I called AT&T support on Monday--how did they magically appear? And from numbers I've never heard of. And numbers that, if I call them, give me no name, just an automated voice listing their numbers. Who's behind those calls, AT&T?

Before I was just pissed. Now I'm genuinely angry because of the rudeness of AT&T Talahassee Manager Ryan Jones. I'm sorry, but that was extremely poor customer service--he was argumentative from the start--even though it's a known issue that persists.

"Your account needs to be reset" he told me--whatever that means. "It doesn't happen instantly." Really, it's computerized but it's not instant, OK, how long does it take? "It should be done by 9pm tonight." Really? Why could no one else tell me this? And what happens if I'm charged at 11pm again? "Just call customer service..." Right, as if I haven't now spent over an hour following up on $11. I'm sorry, my time is worth more than that AT&T, and so, I imagine, is the time of your customer service representatives! So AT&T's incompetence (and or malfeasance) is stealing from me and wasting their own money! What a great business plan! Screw your customers--and yourself!

Seriously--what is wrong with AT&T and why can't they get their act together?

I guess it's time to move to T-mobile, the other major US GSM cell phone provider.

====

P.S. I've learned that the way to get people to read a complaint blog is to add the word "sucks" after the company name. People seem to search for this, as in my posting "Sears sucks." So if you want to complain in blogger, make sure you have "sucks" in your title!

AT&T sucks. There, I've said it again!

The Lost Symbol and new Dirty Words

The "Astonishing" Lost Symbol
and the death of amazing and shocking

I've been reading Dan Brown's latest "The Lost Symbol." Well, first, it was obviously ripped off from my 1999 story "The Lost Codes" which you can read here, http://www.will-harris.com/write/fiction.htm

Almost every other page in Brown's book uses the word, "Astonishing." Every time I see that word I cringe. Come on, the view of Washington DC at night is NOT astonishing, it could be dazzling, spectacular, grand, even awe-inspiring... but I don't believe anybody would be astonished by it, other than natives who'd been brought over blindfolded and never seen electric lights before.

Nor are the many rooms in the sub basement of the Capitol building "astonishing." They could be multitudinous, surprising, shocking, confusing, so many other things but again, unless you've never been in a big building, and even if you grew up on a farm, I don't think a hallway is going to astonish you.

A lot of this blame goes to the editors, who could have said, "Hey, Dan--let's retire the word "astonishing" or reserve it for something that the readers might actually find astonishing, such as the hero having been dropped from a helicopter so that his asshole is astonishingly penetrated by the top of the Washington monument--that would, indeed, be astonishing (as well as painful, unlikely, and hilarious).

What bothers me about this is that the word "amazing" is already so overused it can't be used for anything that is, in fact, truly amazing. To try to counter this, things that are really and truly surprising must now be "amazing amazing," which means that they're not just everyday amazing, they're twice as amazing. Unfortunately, that still belittles a word that used to mean you would react with your mouth agog and store in amazement!

We don't have any truly shocking swear words left.

I didn't say, "fuck" until I was 18, and even then when I said it, it was a big deal. Now, I did say "shit" a lot, and my mother says when I was 4 and another kid tried to beat up my brother I called the kid an "asshole," but even so, "fuck" was a big fucking deal.

The nice thing about Fuck is that it's pretty much universal. I used Google Translate to translate fuck--and it's the same in so many languages that you can easily go almost anywhere in the world and say "fuck" and people will know what you mean (at least in the swear word sense).

So what word can yuo use today to really shock somebody? "Motherfucking cocksucker" is both an oxymoron (if you're a motherfucker chances are only about 10% that you're also going to be a cocksucker), and prosaic.

What's more, everybody's father was a motherfucker, except for perhaps Michael Jackson's kids. Or in vitro babies. So what's the big deal?

Call somebody a dick. So what. Dick Cheney is a total dick and nobody cares. Call somebody a douche or douchebag--what are you, 12?

BITCH used to be a terrible thing to call a woman--now even teen boys call each other bitches. (Tip: if you're going to call somebody a bitch, it's much better to call them a "little bitch" because then they're not even good enough to be a big bitch :)

Here's a list of pejorative terms the urban dictionary suggested:

douchebag asshole fag douche bag bag dick loser idiot gay ass tool bitch cunt faggot jerk retard homo pussy vagina stupid dumbass fuck moron queer lame douchebaggery prick shit whore doosh cock penis jackass slut sex annoying d-bag fucker fucktard twat asshat bro dickhead emo bastard douch dumb noob fool nerd

Of all these, my new favorite is "fucktard" because it's nicely offensive on several levels.

It's not politically correct to call people a "fag" or "faggot" unless you are both gay, which is like any minority group being able to use a bad term within their own group, but is then horrified when someone outside their group uses it--which to me says that if you don't want anybody to say it, don't say it yourself.

"Cunt" is still pretty raw and offensive--in the US, though in the UK it's no big deal. And, if you say something like "Ann Coulter is a cunt," everybody replied, "well, of course."

I guess it's time for somebody to make up a swear word so offensive, so horrible that everybody is shocked to say it unless something happens like they lose a finger in a tragic golfing accident.

OK, the word is "Vitut!"

Short. Simple. Lets you spit it out as you say it. It's just Fuck in Finnish but that's kind of fun. OK, so it's two syllables and ideally should only be one. So try either

VIT!

or

TUT!

and see what happens!

And if you have suggestions for filthy new swear words, leave them in the comments!

Magellan GPS Review: newer, but NOT always better

I have had a Magellan 3225 for over a year and love it. A friend wanted to buy my old one and I wanted traffic service on a new one, so I bought the 1475t at Costco for $180 because it included lifetime free traffic service (as opposed to other models that charge $60 a year for traffic). I will be returning the 1475t to Costco (which, thankfully, accepts returns on opened items).

While the 1475 is an improvement in terms of speed (very fast startup and response, super-fast routing, the ability to see the various proposed routes, predictive city names means less typing, and of course, free traffic service to help route you around traffic jams. All very useful.

Unfortunately, the new model has several basic problems that make it far less useful than the previous one--in fact, these limitations make the unit unacceptable for me.

1) The voice is not as good as it was on the 3225. It's the same voice, but it sounds choppier, mushier. And when it goes from canned text to text-to-speech (street names), it's not only quieter but the TTS is so mushy it's almost unintelligible--basically worthless unless you look at the screen. Its really poor--as if the GPS voice suddenly got marbles--and cotton in its mouth. There's really no excuse for this, given the new unit's increased processing power--especially considering that the older model's TTS was very clear.

2) The power plug is on the bottom. Some people have complained it's too close to the bracket. My complaint is that it means you MUST use a bracket or mount. I don't want a visible mount because in large cities this encourages car break-in, as thieves look for GPS to steal

I have a silicone mat that holds the GPS in place--and this worked perfectly with the 3225 that has the power plug on the side. But with the 1475's power plug on the bottom, there's no way for the unit to sit flat! This combined with the larger size means it also doesn't fit in my car. (Speaking of larger--the wider screen really didn't seem very valuable--when you drive, you are going "up" on almost all GPS, so a taller screen might make sense, but a wider one didn't seem more useful to me).

3) The touch-screen requires that I use my fingernail to get it to respond properly. I noticed that with the demo model in the store, but thought that was just because it had been overused. But my brand new GPS had the same thing--a touch with the fingertip often got no response, so I had to use my fingernail. This makes it harder to use--and I'm not sure how the screen will wear over time. Again, the touch-screen on the previous generation just worked better!

4) The traffic feature (the main reason I bought it), has yet to work. It's always "acquiring signal" and never managed to acquire it. Perhaps I wasn't close enough to a road that was covered by the system (though I was only about two miles from the 101 freeway), but even so, it should be able to get a signal so it can give me an accurate time for the route, shouldn't it? And yes, I have the proper traffic cable, which came with the unit as advertised.

And, despite the unit's super-fast (instantaneous, really) routing, it took as long, as if not longer, to find the satellites as my old unit did--in fact, up to two minutes (this is in a rural location, starting out in a garage, and it's fast enough so that even when I was in LA I'd just turn it on, let it "warm up" and go).

I also have quibbles about the interface--the screen space taken for the large +/- buttons at the bottom could be better used showing useful information--like all the data that's crammed into the lower left corner and requires repeated presses to see. I don't need the GPS to tell me my speed, my car has a speedometer for that purpose. If the GPS would tell me when I was speeding, then I could see the use of that function (Garmin shows your current speed--under the posted speed limit--OK, that's useful), otherwise, it's superfluous.

I'd like to be able to see the distance remaining and ETA together, but I can't, because giant +/- buttons I will never use while driving are taking that space. Plus, the poor mush-mouth voice calls ETA simply "TA" - why?

When I press on the top line to hear the next maneuver, it sometimes gives me the one touch menu--I don't want that, but the design makes it difficult to get the right result on a click.

Finally, a complaint about Magellan's routing (and all routing systems can create odd routes, this includes Google Maps and Garmin GPSs as well). With Magellan, sometimes they get a route in their head and won't let go. And if I miss a cutoff or take a different street, instead of simply rerouting, their route of choice is often, "When possible, make a legal u-turn."

I can understand if this is the ONLY navigation option, but a GPS's job is to get me from where I am to where I want to go--so if where I am isn't where it thought I should be--it should figure it out, not insist I make a u-turn and go back where it wanted me to be.

Recently with my older model, construction blocked a route, and the GPS kept insisting I make a U-turn back to the road that was now impassable. That wasn't helpful. (If I hadn't been mad at the GPS I would have remembered I could have used the "detour" function to get me around the mess).

Instead, I had to drive miles out of my way before it stopped telling me to turn around--something that wouldn't have helped! To credit the 1475, it's so fast that it quickly finds a new route--but still only after first wanting me to pull a u-ey.

Last but not least, a question about traffic service. I don't understand why this unit has lifetime free traffic reception (if it could actually receive it, as mine couldn't), whereas models such as the 3250 (which have the form factor and voice I prefer) require a $60 a year subscription for the same data? I'm sorry, but that sounds like price gouging--if the service can be offered for free on some units, why does it cost so much on others?

This unit is really fine--and if the traffic feature is important to you then it's a great value at Costco (which should have it through the xmas season 2009--though it's at their stores and isn't available online).

It's just that I hope each new generation of a device is better than the last, that it's learned from customer feedback and the creativity of industrial- and interface designers. In this case, while some of the interface is much slicker and it's much faster, it doesn't necessarily make it much--if any better. That's not improvement, that's just change.

BOTTOM LINE: Overall the 1465t has many worthwhile features and it's tremendous speed is noteworthy. It's too bad that poor plug placement and a hard-to-understand voice get in the way--since both the voice and plug were well done on their previous generation. I will be buying a Magellan Maestro 3250 which costs just $109 on Amazon

Hey, Google, Hire Me!

I want to work for Google.

Why? Because they are making the things I use most often, and one of my skills is to take available things and make the most of them. That's what I did in the early years of PC's (as one of the writers of "The Personal Computer Book"), in the early years of DTP (as the author of the very first book about Desktop Publishing on a PC, Desktop Publishing with Style), in the early years of the web and web building (with www.efuse.com - "the friendly place to learn how to build a better web site").

Google could really use something like efuse.com (even though efuse is almost 10 years old it still has lots of timeless useful information that people should know to make their web site more effective and attractive).

Schmoogle would show people how to use all of Google's many offerings together.

If I could actually speak to somebody at Google (are you listening, Googlers?), I would pitch them the idea that what Google is building is the online equivalent of what Xerox did 25 years ago with the Star--creating an integrated environment for information.

Not just a search engine, or just word processor or just email or just graphics, or even just advertising--but all of them mixed freely together (and the upcoming Google Wave looks like it's a move in that direction).

I would create a scenario where someone did virtually all their work via Google--through Android, chrome, research, gmail, docs, photos, news, maps, blogging, photo albums, video, web building, e-commerce... these are the current google offerings.

I'd also explain, as nicely as I could, that all need to work better together--specifically, you can have an Android phone and gmail and google docs and picasaweb and groups and blogs and you have to do SIX or MORE searches to find things on all of them. Why is there not one overall search for YOUR google account? One search that shows me results from my phone, gmail, docs, and photos? That's pretty brain-dead basic, ain't it?

Perhaps Google wants fewer people to know about the breadth of their Googleverse - since everyone else, including MS, are so far behind them, and Adobe, which seems to have tried with their flash-based online word processor, also seems to view online stuff as an afterthought to $600 boxed software.

Even so, it still amazes me how many things people don't know about what you can do with good (and online in general). Even a simple "tip of the day" email would be a handy thing.

Then again, maybe I could just teach improv classes to the engineers to get them to think outside the box :)

:D

Mozy Sucks

I have once again been taught that powerful and annoying lesson that you get what you pay for.

I have a LOT of data on my computer--years of design work and graphics. Almost 200GB of it.

And I'm religious about backups, because I don't want to lose any of it. I used to use disks (so archaic I don't even have drives that will read them anymore!), tapes (awful, no drivers for old readers), CDs (don't hold much), DVDs (hold more but still not that much), Flash drives (hold more, fast, but not good long-term)...

And then I discovered online backup. I actually reviewed them for cnet.com. At first the idea of backing up my private data over the web to some server somewhere didn't feel right.

Then, as the systems used heavy encryption, it felt fine--and also made me feel better to know my backups were off-site, sometimes duplicated at two sites, sometimes inside one of the James Bond mountains.

Connection Online Backup, which is housed in one of those high-security mountains, was what I used on my Windows PC for years. It was fast, smart (only backing up changes), reliable, and reasonable--about $15 a month for 10GB. But 10GB just wasn't enough and as I needed more space, the cost became prohibitive.

I tried Mozy for Windows but it was brutally slow, took over my computer and made everything else virtually stop, so I uninstalled it.

When I moved to the Mac, I started using software called JungleDisk that uses Amazon's S3 server systems to store your encrypted data. Amazon has a huge infrastructure and smartly decided to start renting out disk space and other features and I felt like they'd have great reliability. The JungleDisk software is well designed, easy to use, also only backs up changes, runs really fast (even my first backup of over 100GB took only about a week), and you can access your backed up files through the Finder as if they were on a normal drive--as well as accessing them remotely through a web site if you so choose.

Amazon's backup rates are quite reasonable (15¢ per gigabyte), so my monthly fee was $15. Jungledisk the software itself was free--though you could buy it for $10 to get support, which I did because it's good and well worth it.

Despite this, I was lured to once again try Mozy because it advertised "unlimited backup for $4.95" - Saving $10 a month sounded good, so I installed Mozy...

That was six months ago. It took over five months to back up my data.

Let me say that again--it took over five months to back up my data.

As I said, I have a lot of data, but even so, five months? OK, so that's only $25, but it's five months during which time if I wasn't also using JungleDisk I wouldn't have a real backup.

And then it started to get fun--because once it finally backed up everything, it stopped backing up new things. It tried, but it always gave me a "connectionerror1." Support would tell me "you need the new version" and I'd download and install the new version and I'd get the same error message.

This has gone on for over a month. One day it was magically again able to backup, but that was a fluke, it stopped again. I've been emailing back and forth to support, almost daily, for over a month--six weeks, really. They're very nice but they never solve the problem.

I exported a 75MB log file for them to view. They did, and then they told me to downgrade to a previous version (when I had the previous version they told me to upgrade to the newer one). They explained this probably wouldn't work but they wanted to see the log file.

I'll be generous and say it must work for somebody--maybe people with very few files. Maybe their mistake is selling it for "unlimited" backup when it's really only good at about 2GB which you can get for free. But if you don't have many files, then get the free version and leave it at that.

It finally came to a head when I wanted to back up a file. I'd saved a newer file over an older one by mistake. OK, no big deal, that's why I backup. So I went to restore, I waited several hours--oh, that's right, let me repeat it, I WAITED SEVERAL HOURS FOR THE RESTORE TO LOAD, AND THEN IT FAILED. Others report waiting over two weeks for their files to be ready to restore--and that's when the software did work. That's unacceptable.

So--Mozy, the backup system, won't backup, and perhaps even worse, it won't restore.

That, my friends, is not a value even at $5 a month. That is, in fact, a total waste of time, CPU and bandwidth.

I wish I was alone about this--but do a web search for "Mozy Sucks" and you'll see windows and Mac users who have had the same issues--ConnectionError1, it won't restore.

BUT DON'T PAY FOR MOZY. As cheap as it is, it's not worth it.

I have had all good luck using www.JungleDisk.com - first under Windows, then on the Mac (where I can still access all the Windows files I backed up).

----

Update, 9/18/09 - It's been 9 days since I got a nice email from Devin at Decho, the company that owns Mozy. He offered to help me, and has been working with engineers... and I decided to give Mozy one last chance.

But it's now been 20 days since Mozy was able to back up my files. 20 days without a backup? That's totally unacceptable. As well as, apparently, unexplainable!

Devin worked with the developers to change something on the backend of my account and hoped that would solve the problem--but I don't understand what kind of changes should be necessary to my account to make it simply connect as it has connected and should connect every day.

I'm not be facetious, I am asking as someone who has beta tested software and worked with software companies for over 25 years--why something so basic as getting and maintaining a connection is so difficult for Mozy.

After all this, how can I possibly trust Mozy to backup regularly? And another reason I want to uninstall Mozy now and be done with all this is that I'm also tired of the extra time it takes to boot my Mac because of whatever Mozy is doing, and the way Mozy slows down my computer when it's looking at my files for changes... and it takes it well over an hour to get ready to do a backup, then tells me it can't--wasted time, bandwidth and energy.

I've given them until start of day, Tuesday, to make Mozy work. If they can't, then I will uninstall it and nicely request a refund of all the money I've spent. It would be nice if they could also do something to compensate me for my lost time and bandwidth... something like an iPhone or Palm Prē would be acceptable.

---

Monday afternoon I got a call with several people from Mozy. They got it to work. Hooray! And while I still cannot restore using the app, I was able to restore online and it only took a few minutes--I selected the files, then received an email when they were ready to download. On the Mac they're downloaded as a disk image that has the files in their original folders.

So, it is possible for Mozy to work (and ever since it's worked without connection errors). That said, it still does suck up a lot of processing power and time during startup (it seems to add at least 45 seconds to startup time), and after all I've been through it's hard to trust it.

I will give it a chance and see.

If you have a problem--write a blog post that says "Mozy Sucks" and I'm sure Devin will find it and help you. Otherwise, support probably won't be able to. That's not a good way to handle support, but if you're having trouble, at least somebody at Mozy is looking for squeaky wheels.