AT&T: Too Big to Function

 

A great many people think they are thinking when they are actually rearranging their prejudices.- William James

The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? - Anonymous

Participant Observation is a research methodology commonly utilized in academic disciplines like sociology, anthropology, social psychology and others. What it means and how it occurs can focus on either participation or observation in a culture to a greater or lesser degree. Some of the best studies have come from individuals who were totally immersed in a culture as a participant without any ulterior motive of writing about the experience at a later date. This was the case for me and is the perspective for what follows.

When I started in July 2000 the company at least locally was still known as Pacific Bell. I quickly understood that in reality Pacific Bell was no more. It had been purchased by Southwestern Bell which at that point had also accumulated Ameritech Corporation and Southern New England Telephone. These entities, including Southwestern Bell, were all “Baby Bells”, essentially companies that provided regional telephone services in the United States. They all came into existence after the Bell System divestiture more commonly known as the breakup of AT&T.

The breakup of AT&T was initiated by the filing in 1974 by the U.S. Department of Justice of an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T.[1] The case, United States v. AT&T, led to a settlement finalized on January 8, 1982, under which "Ma Bell" agreed to divest its local exchange service operating companies, in return for a chance to go into the computer business, AT&T Computer Systems. Effective January 1, 1984, AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent Regional Holding Companies, also known as Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or "Baby Bells".

In 2000 they were collectively known as SBC Communications or simply SBC. Essentially SBC was an acronym for Southwestern Bell Corporation.

In 2005 SBC acquired what remained of the original AT&T broken up in 1982 by the antitrust action of the U.S. Justice Department. At this time AT&T was primarily a long distance, data, wireless and Internet service provider. SBC of course understood the significance of the historical and iconic company name AT&T and kept it for the new company formed by the merger. They did change the logo. They should have kept the old one.

In March 2006 AT&T/SBC acquired another of the few remaining “Baby Bells” still around BellSouth. Prior to this, BellSouth and SBC shared a joint venture in Cingular Wireless. After the details were settled, Cingular Wireless became AT&T Mobility and this combined all of the wireless assets of the various corporate entities AT&T/SBC now represented.

I’m deliberately leaving out a lot of minutiae of this evolution as the subject is so easily researchable on the Internet.

I’m now going to devote the remainder of this article describing what it was like working for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies in the first decade of the 21^st Century.

It was a big corporation in 2000. At one point between 2000 and 2005 it had over 180,000 employees ranging over a dozen states from California to the east coast. My job title was Technical Architect. I was responsible for developing and maintaining the computer software associated with part of the billing system. It consisted of working on new projects as well as monitoring and maintaining the section of the implemented billing system my group held responsibility for.

I already had over 15 years experience in the IT industry as a Senior Programmer/Analyst and Database Administrator; there was nothing there that I hadn’t already seen. In fact I brought many new ideas that I had gained from my previous work experience.

One of the first observations I made was that the company had many employees that were in the United States on H-1B work visas. At the time in California this was not unusual at all. I would describe the work environment as cordial and friendly but stressful.

Stress originated from management and project requirements.

I was the primary technical support and single point of contact for one application of the billing system. Still in spite of the stress, one manifestation was being available on a 7x24 basis for at least 2 weeks every month, I was reasonably happy as an employee as there was still nothing occurring that I hadn’t experienced before.

Corporations measure success as a function of the value and performance of the company stock and employee compensation was a dependent variable in this equation. A “good year” brings wealth to the major corporate stockholders. It is as simple as that and if this doesn’t happen then it isn’t a “good year” and one found that the majority of the stock was held by a relatively small number of individuals usually called the board of directors. The “Board” as it is known is usually headed by a single individual, the Chief Executive Officer or CEO. What results is that a “relatively” small number of individuals who compose the board of directors decide what strategies are used to increase the value of the company stock.

Profit is the primary driving force behind stock performance and one means of increasing profit is to reduce expenses. Since employee compensation is an expense, one mechanism of increasing profit is to reduce the expenses accrued from employee compensation.

It follows logically that because living in the United States is more expensive than say living in Eastern Europe, Asia or one of the Pacific Island nations, compensation for employees there would be significantly less than what would have to be paid a worker in the United States to perform the same function. Thus corporations came up with a new strategy to increase profits and created a new term to describe it. The term was offshoring. There are other good sources of information on this. One is Offshoring IT jobs? Consider the risks, not just the rewards.

Oh and the chart at the top of this essay is a linear plot of the share price of AT&T stock over the past year. As can be seen it is presently going down. When I left the company in February 2007 the share price was over 40 USD. Over the past year the share price in USD has been in the low and mid 20s. In 2007 CEO Ed Whitaker was predicting the share price would be over 100 USD within a year. It wasn't and now it appears unlikely that it will ever get there.

In large organizations like AT&T employees are often organized into groups. In early 2005 my group was "offshored" and everyone had to find another job within the company. The company provided some help in the process but it wasn't a pleasant experience.

I’m not going into comprehensive details; there will be one or two specific examples of what happened to me personally while I was an employee that I will examine to illustrate my experience.

Many of these were considered accomplishments and others were trauma inducing that required medical attention. This latter group was also a violation of criminal and EEOC law. One might say that the work environment I was in had become highly "unregulated" and pathological.

SIGNIFICANT EVENTS AS AN AT&T EMPLOYEE

Through direct personal action on numerous occasions I prevented several major multi-month projects from failure. Failure would have burdened the company with tens of millions of lost USD revenue.

I easily and repeatedly found solutions to problems that were preventing progress and completion of critical projects that no other AT&T employee had been able to solve.

I was repeatedly called to fix system failures that no other AT&T employee was able to fix.

I frequently recovered software systems from failure status that failed due to the blunders of other AT&T employees.

I developed, tested and implemented several major software systems the company critically needed. A few examples are:

A disaster recovery system for an entire software system with over 350 pages of documentation. In spite of the documentation, no other AT&T employee could understand it sufficiently to maintain it and I was asked to critically intervene on many occasions to keep it functioning correctly. I knew this system would be too complex for anyone else to adequately maintain when I created it.

• It was here, in the fall and winter of 2005 when working on the 350 pages of documentation, that I sustained an injury to my right wrist and elbow. I would be working with pain and numbness in my right wrist, forearm and elbow from this point onward.
• I developed, tested and implemented edit processing for software systems to conform to the emerging common business market across AT&T.
• I designed and implemented software systems for the seamless processing of 10-digit and 14-digit telephone numbers in the Efficient Data Representation project for pooled numbers. This required programming to correctly assign NPA (Area Code) to reformatted 14-digit telephone numbers.
• I designed and implemented software system to proactively monitor critical database applications for fault indicators. The intention was to find and fix potential problems and failures before they occurred.
• Many of the systems I designed and implemented were simply too complex for other AT&T employees to comprehend. Such accomplishments were seldom mentioned in any formal evaluation of my performance achievements.  This was endemic to the existing corporate culture.  Thus I was expected to solve problems that nobody else could solve.  Again, expected to.

Obviously it would be remiss for me not to say that I worked closely with other employees who were familiar with the business model in order to accomplish the items mentioned above. My advantage was that I had more practical technical experience in IT that utilized methods no one else knew or understood.

One may ask why am I listing all of this. The answer can be found in what happened to me as an individual. I will cover this next although I still find it unpleasant to think about.

SIGNIFICANT PERSONAL EVENTS I EXPERIENCED AS AN AT&T EMPLOYEE

Being an employee of AT&T is much like being a customer of AT&T. Concern for others is strictly limited to what one is obligated to bestow. For customers this means paying bills. For employees this means accomplishing things that enhance the status of the employee’s immediate supervisor. As a customer or employee, if one fails to provide what the company wants, expect to be threatened and intimidated. Standing up to them is the best way to proceed.

While I was there I was sent personal emails from another employee which was accusative, insulting and threatening. This person had no standing in management. When I brought it to the intention of my supervisor, I was told that it shouldn’t have happened, that what was said was totally unfounded and that he would “take care of it.” When I asked the supervisor what he had told the employee, I was told it was confidential. However the behavior toward me by the person who sent it never changed.

Before my original group was “offshored” I got along with everyone in it. As I mentioned, the working environment was stressful and when under stress people can behave uncharacteristically. I already knew this and didn’t let me bother me.

After my original group was offshored I eventually found a new position. I will describe two situations I had to deal with as an employee with a new group. Most of the people, including my immediate supervisor, on this team were located in Saint Louis, MO while I was working in the East Bay area of California, specifically San Ramon, CA. The system I was supporting didn’t really involve other members of the group and most of my contacts with other AT&T employees were with users of the software system I was supporting, debugging, enhancing and maintaining.

When I took the new position I was given information and operational training on a system that was supposedly error free and running daily without any problems. About 2 months after I became responsible for it and after making some requested changes, I was suddenly informed there was a serious billing error occurring in it. It seemed to be localized within three Revenue Accounting Offices in Texas. This (RAO) is an abstract term and you can find definitions for the common telecommunications acronyms in the Telecom Dictionary on the Internet.

In any event, I worked on the suspect program with a software diagnostic tool called Xpediterr - the program under analysis was very complex even for me - however by December 2005 I had a good idea of what was happening in it and how to fix it.

At this point it was a formality for me to resolve the problem but before it could have been placed into production I would have to test and document what I had done to correct the program bug.

In December I required abdominal surgery to repair a hernia in my stomach. I had lived with the injury for some time and my doctor at that point was saying that I should get it taken care of as soon as possible. It could have ruptured. This surgical procedure required general anesthesia and a two week recovery. The surgery and recovery transpired over the last two weeks of December 2005.

I returned to work the first week of January 2006.

I had a long anticipated vacation scheduled to visit my wife's family in Bulgaria beginning in the middle of January 2006. This had been on my calendar for months. However when I came back I was told that I had to work with someone else because it was taking so long to resolve the software bug. The bug had been there for years so I didn't understand why it was suddenly taking "too long" to resolve.

Anyway I did correct the error without any input from the person who was assigned to help me; to be honest, the idea of someone "helping" me at AT&T was rather amusing. I was accustom to receiving obfuscation rather than help from most of my co-workers. One thing was for certain: no one else had any idea what the program bug was and when I pointed it out to them they were totally clueless on why it had been “unobserved” for so long before I found it.

In any event, once I solved the billing error problem though, I sent this simple email (my original is on the bottom) saying that the billing totals were now correct on the report. It seemed to cause a lot of excitement. ===============================================================================================

-----Original Message-----
From: WRIGHT, BARRY (SBCSI)
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 8:21 AM
To: BRADY, THOMAS D (SBCSI)
Subject: RE: Totals are correct

It is live defect #47029.

-----Original Message-----
From: BRADY, THOMAS D (SBCSI)
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 6:20 AM
To: WRIGHT, BARRY (SBCSI)
Cc: STRIGHT, SANDRA A (SBCSI)
Subject: RE: Totals are correct

What’s the defect number or problem report number? I’ll ask Laura to get it into the appeal process.

Thanks

Tom Brady

Sr. Technical Team Leader Billing Technical Support 414-226-0497 phone 414-407-9866 pager

b9352@att.com

-----Original Message-----
From: WRIGHT, BARRY (SBCSI)
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 8:17 AM
To: BRADY, THOMAS D (SBCSI)
Subject: RE: Totals are correct

To get it into production ASAP, I think it would.

BARRY

Barry Wright Technical Architect Billing Technical Support

2W200EE 2600 Camino Ramon San Ramon, CA 94583

Office: (925) 823-0853 PCS: (925) 548-1183 Email: bw1637@att.com

-----Original Message-----
From: BRADY, THOMAS D (SBCSI)
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 6:14 AM
To: WRIGHT, BARRY (SBCSI)
Cc: STRIGHT, SANDRA A (SBCSI)
Subject: RE: Totals are correct

Barry,

So does the “fix” need to be appealed into a release to correct production?

Tom Brady

Sr. Technical Team Leader

Billing Technical Support

414-226-0497 phone

414-407-9866 pager

tb9352@att.com

-----Original Message-----
From: WRIGHT, BARRY (SBCSI)
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 2:20 PM
To: HEINDEL, RITA A (SBCSI); WILLIAMSON, CHERYL E (SWBT); MOORHEAD, CAROL L (SBCSI); DZIEDZIC, DAN (SBCSI)
Cc: BRADY, THOMAS D (SBCSI); STRIGHT, SANDRA A (SBCSI)
Subject: Totals are correct

See Attacked.

BARRY

Barry Wright Technical Architect Billing Technical Support

2W200EE 2600 Camino Ramon San Ramon, CA 94583

Office: (925) 823-0853 PCS: (925) 548-1183 Email: bw1637@att.com

===============================================================================================

At this point after seeing an orthopedist and after being told by my supervisor in Missouri that I was too slow in resolving problems and wasn’t performing to his expectations, it was determined that I had torn cartilage in my right wrist and nerve damage between my right wrist and elbow. I had already started using my left hand and arm to control the computer mouse. There was quite a bit of pain associated with any movement of my right hand and arm. I was prescribed anti-inflammatory medication and given Cortisone shots in my wrist.

I also had surgery in this time frame for the removal of a tumor the size of a "ping pong" ball, according to the surgeon. The procedure also required general anesthesia.

I was given a work restriction by my doctor but I was still the only person who could deal with the problems this supposedly bug free system was suddenly encountering and after finding and correcting the first bug, guess what happened...? A second program bug was discovered totally unrelated to the one I just solved.

Regarding the work restriction, AT&T had contracted a company to deal with the health problems of its employees. I had to fax a form signed by my doctor to a person in this company. It would be validated and my supervisor would be informed accordingly.

My supervisor must have treated this as his best kept secret. I was harassed by the team lead on a continuing basis. He would tell me that I was taking too long and so on. According to the work restriction, I was limited to using my right arm for a maximum of 4 hours a day. Again I don’t know who knew this other than my immediate supervisor because the demands for output continued unfettered.

I now know the damage to my right wrist, forearm and elbow is permanent. Writing this essay has caused a flare-up: pain in the wrist and elbow, right forearm is numb. Go figure. It was just another example of AT&T priorities.

The second bug involved monthly minimum billing. The way the program was designed, if an entity had zero charges in a billing cycle, it should have checked in a monthly minimums table to determine if monthly minimums applied to the entity. The program didn't do this and it was obvious that checking monthly minimums was NEVER in the original design. It had been malfunctioning this way for years.

As stated, I discovered this and put in a query that would have corrected the problem but the supervisor stalled on approving it. In the mean time I was talking with a user of the system, a lady in Texas, who had identified the problem and was asking me when the program correction was going to be implemented.

I told her that I had the new version of the program out in the software maintenance system but it needed the approval of my Technical Director, the person in Missouri who thought I was too slow for his team. He knew that I was on a work restriction and still was solving problems no one else was working on.

She said she was going to send an email to him and his team lead and I told her to go ahead. When she sent the email, I started getting aggressive questions from the team lead. Greater detail really isn't necessary. My point is that I was told this was a stable system and as soon as I became responsible for it, I was inundated with problems which I had to deal with as well as pressure from the team lead and immediate supervisor.

In fact, I already discovered the solution and had informed Rita before she sent the email. The team lead went into a panic mode when he received Rita's email as he thought it was about the first bug that I had resolved the previous March. I provided monthly status reports for my immediate supervisor and updated the work matrix every week but the ream lead and supervisor apparently didn't check it and didn't communicate. This was clearly obvious when it came to my work restriction. It stated that by now I shouldn't be using the keyboard more than 2.5 hours a day. However I kept receiving demanding emails even during my last week there.

This was my final email to Rita on the problem.

===============================================================================================

-----Original Message-----

From: WRIGHT, BARRY (SBCSI)

Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 10:51 AM

To: HEINDEL, RITA A (SBCSI)

Subject: Monthly minimum carriers

Rita,

This query:  SELECT CARRIER_ID,MNTHLY_MIN_IND,ACTIVE_IND, MONTHLY_MIN_BILLED, MNTHLY_MIN_KEYCODEFROM DBT4CRD1.CRT111_CARRIER A WHERE A.MNTHLY_MIN_IND = 'Y' AND A.ACTIVE_IND = 'Y' AND NOT (A.CARRIER_ID IN (SELECT B.CARRIER_ID FROM DBT4CRD1.CRT118_BILLED_SUMM B WHERE B.MNTHLY_MIN_IND = 'Y'))

Should select the monthly minimum eligible carriers in the carrier table that aren't in the billed summary table. As we discussed yesterday, this seems to be what is needed. Only 3 qualifying rows in production.

0007742100 Y Y 250.00 B5A

0008014M00 Y Y 13333.00 B5A

0008015M00 Y Y 250.00 B5A

and they are in the carrier table and not in the billed summary table. This should do it if you can get them to implement it after I'm gone.

BARRY

Barry Wright Technical Architect Billing Technical Support

2W200EE 2600 Camino Ramon San Ramon, CA 94583

Office: (925) 823-0853 PCS: (925) 548-1183 Email: bw1637@att.com

===============================================================================================

So the problem was solved, all they had to do was implement it.

By this point my time with AT&T was rapidly approaching its end. I had decided to take the lump sum for my pension along with my 401k and get out of there in early 2007. I left in February.

Again, the condition - an injury sustained in late 2005 in my right arm - has not gotten better, it is permanently damaged. It is still numb and painful when I type or use it marginally extensively for anything. What I have is not carpel-tunnel; there is permanent nerve damage. I now have to always use the computer mouse with my left hand and using my right arm is limited. This injury cannot be compensated for by Social Security Disability or anything else.

Try immobilizing your right arm and then attempt to do work with a computer keyboard and mouse and see how that works for you. It is a limiting physical condition in my right arm - sustained in 2005 and present during my tenure with the “Missouri group” - that will be present for the rest of my life. So ask yourself: why was I "working slowly"? Well any work at all that utilized my right arm was extremely difficult; I shouldn't have been using it at all.

I know that it could be much worse and is for many others but I never said anything, I keep working as usual without complaining until the last year when the situation was so bad that I simply couldn’t continue and finally heeded what doctors were advising me to do.

There were many other things that happened to me, some of which I've only provided hints about, but the ones I’ve described here are typical and sufficient for my intentions in this essay.

To sum up, I accomplished a lot but in the final 2 years I didn’t feel close at all to my co-workers (they were mostly in Missouri, I was in California) and was injured. This impacted my productivity; nevertheless I was able to remediate two major errors in billing that were in this group’s production software long before I arrived.

One was a design failure and was present when the program was first implemented. My conclusion was that much of the Missouri group’s software was suspect and their software deployment cycle was flawed. Unit testing scenarios were not comprehensive and sometimes ignored; integration testing and system testing were inadequate. As a consequence, when I left in 2007 it was obvious to me that whoever assumed my position was going to be dealing with software and billing errors for a long time to come.

In closing this section, I should say that I had worked as a “Technical Architect” for other American Corporations so I knew what was expected. If you had this position, you were expected to work as many hours as necessary to complete whatever projects were assigned to you. I remember working evenings, weekends, and holidays like Christmas and when working in San Francisco, I even worked on days the 49ers were in the Super Bowl. This I find especially difficult to believe.

Again this was part of the assumptions, the expectations one had about the job. Regardless of how many hours you worked, you would be paid your salary and that was all. Some companies talked about “comp time” but I don’t recall ever receiving any.

This might serve as a useful example. There was a previous job where I was project leader and several employees came to me asking about being paid “overtime” because we were all working outrageous hours. I knew nothing would come of this but I informed my supervisor. He said “you have to tell these people that they are salaried employees and there is no such thing as overtime for them.” I thought yeah right and had to laugh. AT&T was just a new name for the same game that I had seen so many times before.

Thus when I started working for the company that became AT&T, I had already worked under all of the situations I've described. That it continued was something I personally didn't find unexpected. From the beginning, I would get calls at all hours of the day and night about problems that nobody else could fix. Something like this happened on the first project I worked on. I had developed a means to convert files from one record format to another. I was called in the middle of the night from groups I had no connection to at all and was asked to “convert their file” for them because it was holding up production. I of course had provided the tools and information for them to do this themselves, before their module went into production, but that was wishful thinking on my part. It didn’t happen. None of them could do this on their own.

So when I started with AT&T with management in the Midwest, my expectations on what I would have to do there were nothing different. There were certain processes I was responsible for and if something happened to them I would be called. Someone had to sort out the mess which almost always was caused by someone else.

At some point in this I formed an opinion and conclusion that the more talented you were the more management would abuse you to do extra work. I calculated at one point on my own that 10% of the work force did 90% of the work. If you found someone else who was good, you’d try and make them your friend. Sometimes they would reciprocate. The problem was bringing this to the attention of one’s manager. Again it is the 10% rule, the more talented one was, the more work would be loaded on your plate to deal with. It is like the laws of physics; it is always that way wherever you go.

Without actually asking someone to work overtime, the methods they use to abuse workers had to be clever. What I found is first one was told the “importance” of getting something resolved. As mentioned, sometimes it had been a problem for years or was even present in the original software design. It takes time to solve these problems, so what would typically happen is someone like the team lead would remind one of the “importance” aspects. The supervisor, on the other hand, would tell you that you aren’t performing “up to expectations.” This amounted to a real threat which anyone would have to take seriously. It could affect the amount you received on the team award, your performance evaluation and the amount of your yearly salary increase. So the pressure was subtle but very intense to put in extra time.

When the team I was on was in San Ramon CA I could speak with the team lead on a daily basis and there were weekly team meetings where there would be status updates on all projects. This was something the team lead kept current. When I officially started working for AT&T with a team lead and supervisor in the Midwest, all of this changed. There were no team meetings where status was discussed for all projects. The only time the team lead learned of anything regarding project status was when someone like me told him that it was resolved or, in my case, when someone else told him a software issue needed approval to be implemented. His response was to invariably act as if he were totally unaware of what was going on. I have several emails that document this.

I experienced this and eventually the pain in my right arm got so severe that a doctor provided a work restriction. Did this halt the pressure tactics of management? No. The supervisor would give lip service to the work restriction; in my case he even found a way that I would obtain ice from the cafeteria for my elbow.

I hardly had time for that. I was too busy attending status meetings, answering emails from the group of business analysts who were upset because I hadn’t figured the problem out yet and because of the work I was doing trying to solve the problem. This is a very slow process.

In the end, I realized the work restriction was meaningless because the pressure was still directed at me and no one else had the skills to solve.

When I finally left, the reason I gave was that I could no longer tolerate the pain in my right wrist and elbow.

For me, my hope was that the shroud of the Dark Side that seemed to fall over me almost two years in the past would now begin to dissipate. And yet, in spite of how bad as this may sound, there were even more traumatic events - one might call them unbelievable - that I had to confront while an AT&T employee. I just don't feel like discussing them in writing at present.

I can say that my last supervisor and his team lead, both incredibly uninformed and technically incompetent, were able to drive a review of my performance into the performance evaluation tool and mentioned everything I did except credit for finding and fixing major billing errors in a system I was initially unfamiliar with. I’ll say it again; the corporate culture was such that I resolved billing errors that had existed years before I became part of the unit. I solved them, fixed them despite major medical problems and all of this was overlooked. Again, achievements that were not even mentioned. Hard to believe and in many ways I’m sorry that I couldn’t have continued long enough to resolve this in my favor.

SIGNIFICANT PERSONAL EVENTS I EXPERIENCED AS AN AT&T CUSTOMER

As I’ve already mentioned, AT&T treats its customers the same way it deals with its employees. To its management, a single individual whether an employee or customer is nothing. There is a lot of talk presently going around about corporations that are “too big to fail.” In the case of AT&T, it would be best described as too big to function.

Let me provide an example drawn from my own recent personal experience with AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless.

After voluntarily leaving AT&T in February 2007, my wife and I returned to our home in Eastern Oregon. I had rolled my 401k and pension lump sum into an IRA. We also have business property in Oregon which was providing monthly rental income. We both had medical conditions so we had to accept the COBRA medical coverage option. COBRA essentially continues whatever medical coverage one had as an employee only the entire premium is the responsibility of the individual. It was expensive but absolutely necessary.

In June 2008 I reached my 62^nd birthday and became eligible for Social Security. The additional income was very nice but COBRA coverage only lasts 18 months. I saw my attorney to discuss everything that had happened to my wife and me over the past 8 years. After learning of the medical problems I was returning to Oregon with, especially the situation with my right arm and the limits its condition placed on my activity, he recommended that I immediately apply for Social Security Disability.

I ended up obtaining the assistance of another attorney who was experienced at processing all the required documents the government needs for a disability claim to be processed. I was somewhat surprised, not because of the severity of my injury (which was acute), when, after several months, my claim was accepted and I was deemed eligible for Social Security Disability. This increased my monthly income from the Social Security Administration and also made me eligible for Medicare. Under normal circumstances, in the United States Medicare isn’t available until age 65.

This solved the medical insurance issue for me but we still have to pay over $500 a month for insurance coverage for my wife. She won’t be eligible for Medicare until 2016. It would be nice if the medical insurance reforms recently passed by the U.S. Congress will result in lowering my wife’s monthly premiums. It will probably still be a couple of months before we find out how that is going to work.

So we are on a very tight budget and unexpected expenses are a serious matter. I had to draw money from my IRA to pay for living expenses and this was definitely not good and couldn’t continue. A solution had to be found.

As a consequence I was looking for expenses in our monthly budget that might be reduced. We found a few and took immediate action. Something I did see was an expense of over $50 a month for cellular telephones that we seldom used here in Eastern Oregon. I had her call AT&T Mobility to see if a lower rate was possible and they said there wasn’t.

So we started looking and found a cellular phone service endorsed by AARP where provided services were slightly less than $20 a month for two phones. All we needed a cellular phone service for were unusual situations or emergencies. So this looked very good.

Before discontinuing AT&T Mobility we planned a trip to Europe so my wife could visit her family in Sofia Bulgaria. Flights to Bulgaria from the United States are expensive while flights to Germany, for example, cost much less. So we decided that when we went, I would stay in Munich and she would fly to Sofia from Munich by herself. A ticket from Lufthansa for a flight from Munich to Sofia was quite a bit less than the cost difference between a flight from the United States to Bulgaria and a flight from the United States to Germany and then from Germany to Bulgaria. There was one issue though; I felt we needed to be able to contact each other while we were in Europe. One never knows what could possibly happen.

The plan we had with AT&T Mobility didn’t provide coverage in Europe but we called and were told that that wasn’t a problem, European coverage could be provided for a relatively short period of time and as soon as we returned to the United States, European coverage could be terminated and the monthly costs for wireless services would return to the pervious amount with AT&T Mobility, slightly over $50 a month.

This sounded like a solution and we decided to do this. When we called to have European service added though we were told by AT&T Mobility Customer Service that the cellular phones we currently had wouldn’t possibly work in Europe and that we would be required to obtain new phones.

It turned out that we would have to purchase new phones and with the help of a Customer Service person on the telephone from AT&T Mobility, I selected two new phones from a website the person directed me to. I accepted, agreed to pay the costs involved in obtaining new phones and in a few days the new phones arrived.

We took them to Europe with us and they were useful but really didn’t work very well on calls between Germany and Bulgaria. There were many call failures. Anyway when we arrived back in the United States, we had the European coverage discontinued and things appeared to go back to what was occurring before; our monthly bill went back to what it had been, again a little over $50 a month.

As already mentioned, we had been advised that this was the lowest rate available to us from AT&T. Well based on our current income and expenses, we simply couldn’t sustain this. I kept asking my wife to call AT&T Mobility and cancel our services there but she was quite busy keeping our home in order and handling other things; as a result she never got around to doing this.

Finally I went to the Consumer Cellular website and was able to secure two phones and services for less that $20 a month. The difference between what we were paying AT&T Mobility and Consumer Cellular came to over $400 a year. On fixed income, with Social Security Disability and Medicare for me and privately obtained medical insurance for my wife, that consisted of a lot of money.

At long last, my wife called AT&T to cancel the account. It was April 29, 2010. Customer Service told her they we were under a contract until October 2011 and there would be a cancellation fee of $290 for both phones.

This got my attention and I talked to them. First I said that I was not aware that we were under any kind of "new" contractual obligation. They said the contract went into effect when we purchased the new phones for use in Europe. Neither of us could remember being told anything like that.

I explained that I was being “walked through” the process on the telephone by one of their employees’ who was telling me what to do to navigate on a website to purchase the phones. I was told at this time that when I clicked on the Accept box, I agreed to the contract they claim was in effect.

I really don’t remember being told anything like that back in October 2009. I also don’t remember seeing anything to that effect on the web page with the Accept box and I know for sure that we didn’t receive anything in the mail to indicate we were under a new contract. In fact the bill is identical to what it was before.

I said that we couldn’t afford $290 and that I couldn’t pay it and asked if they could provide some evidence that what they say happened really did occur. They said something to the effect that “oh we have it here.” Again I asked if they could provide that information to me.

I started getting a complete runaround at that point and was transferred to several different representatives. One of the representatives said they she always “tried to tell the customers what was taking place when the Accept box was clicked” but said that she couldn’t say for sure if that had occurred in this instance. I said “surely you have procedures.” She said yes but couldn’t or wouldn’t be more specific. I asked if she could send me something in writing about cancellation fees. She asked if she could use email. My response was no, I wanted something physical and wanted it sent to me through the mail. She was very unspecific and finally said she would send information of some kind. The conversation ended when I said “I will be receiving conformation about this in the mail from you then.” The answer was “sort of” yes.

Later that day my wife called them again, saying that we were just buying new phones, that we were unaware of any new contract, and that we really couldn’t afford the $290 fee they said was a provision of the contract of October 2009. This representative was somewhat more cooperative and told my wife to call the “cancellation department” the next morning. This would be April 30, 2010.

So the next morning (April 30, 2010) we called. My wife talked first and explained everything mentioned above in detail once again. She was getting nowhere with this person. They I said I would talk.

I said that I would like to see physical evidence regarding what they claimed took place in October 2009. I repeated that all we thought we were doing was purchasing new phones that would work outside the United States. I was told “we have the proof here.” I asked if I could have it sent to me.

Basically all my questions were answered in the negative. I couldn’t avoid the fees, there was a new contract that was started in October 2009 and was finally told that if I didn’t pay, it would be “turned over to a collection agency.” This was a threat which I found totally inappropriate under the circumstances when speaking with someone who had been a good customer. They asked if I was a Pacific Bell employee. I said that Pacific Bell no longer existed and that I had retired from AT&T in February 2007. Nothing, including this, seemed to matter to them.

Obviously she wanted to end the call and asked if I had any other questions and I answered “not at all.” She was in the process of giving the standard “thank you for calling customer service for AT&T Mobility…” when I hung up before she finished. All I said before that and after I was threatened with the collection agency routine, was “send me the bill.’

This person gave her name as “Tammy.” The conversation took place on April 30, 2010 at about 1215 MDST. The number we called to reach this person was 800-331-6567.

This was somewhat upsetting and brought back memories of how AT&T treats people in general. However I started looking on the Internet for websites which accepted complaints regarding wireless telephone bills. I found the following:

The Federal Trade Commission Complaint Page.

The Better Business Bureau Complaint Page.

The Federal Communications Commission Complaint Page.

The FCC would be the place to start with something like this. This is the complaint I filed with the FCC on May 19, 2010:

Acknowledgment & Fax Cover sheet to submit additional information.
Filing for: Barry has been received by FCC. Thanks for your information. When inquiring about your complaint, be sure to reference this number: 10-C00219562 and, be sure to mention that you filed this complaint over the internet.

Use this page as a Fax Cover Sheet when faxing additional details to the FCC.

Fax Number (866) 418-0232

Date:	05/19/2010
To:	Federal Communications Commission
From:	Barry Wright
Total Number of Pages:
Subject:	10-C00219562 (Form2000 Filed Via The Internet)

Address:
322 NW 18th Street
Ontario OR 97914

My wife and I were planning a trip to Europe and we wanted to be able to use our cell phones there. When we called AT&T Mobility to arrange this, we were told that the phones we presently had could not function in Europe and that we had to purchase new phones. We agreed to that and were guided through a succession on internet screens to purchase them. At this time all we knew we were doing were purchasing new cellular phones. When we returned from Europe, we had the European "service" shut off. The AT&T Mobility plan was too expensive as I am now receiving Social Security Disability as my primary income. We wanted a less expensive cellular plan. AT&T Mobility said the plan we had was the lowest cost plan available. We decided to cancel the service. We were told that when we purchased the new phones, we initiated a new plan and there was a $290 cancellation fee for this plan until 2011. All we were doing was purchasing new phones and were NEVER told anything about a NEW PLAN.

We were trying to purchase new phone that we could temporarily use in Europe but without our knowledge were filtered into a new wireless calling plan. We could no longer afford the AT&T Mobility account and had to cancel it. We were told that we were in a new calling plan which would not terminate until 2011 and if we cancelled before that, there was a $290 cancellation fee. This was never explained and we are on a limited budget and cannot afford to pay it.

If this were an isolated incident that would be one thing but it isn't. In fact, this seems to be an ongoing problem and pattern with AT&T Mobility as a search of the Oregon Attorney General's Office found over 10 pages of complaints like ours, e.g.:

■Acted unconscionably by using unfair or oppressive contract terms.

■Service quality lower than what the complainant ordered or expected.

■False or misleading description of quality, quantity, or nature of goods or services.

■Collected or attempted to collect for goods or services the complainant never ordered.

You need to investigate this.

===============================================================================================

CONCLUSIONS

I really don’t know what conclusions can be reached from this essay. When I was in graduate school I could never imagine myself working for large American corporations. It was against everything I believed in. But I was paid well for my skills, a six figure salary, which is one possible reason I was not always popular with middle management. The company was heavily loaded with incompetent mid-level managers.

At best I think AT&T can be compared to a runaway freight train. It is leaving a trail of devastation in its wake, but as long as profits are rolling it, they don’t care. 10 pages of complains with State Attorney Generals doesn’t matter and neither does losing individual customers or technically skilled employees. They only think they are afraid of is regulation and that can best be done by the Federal Communications Commission. Eventually something will have to happen in that regard and it will be from the FCC.

Right now in the United States there are only 3 telecommunications corporations left. Verizon, Quest and AT&T, that’s it for the whole country. None of their stock is performing very well and their real competition isn’t within but is coming from cable and satellite television providers. The battleground is for a single provider who offers telecommunications, wireless, broadband Internet, audio and video entertainment (aka television) – all of this appearing on one customer bill from one provider.

Regarding offshoring, I find it interesting that Ed Whitaker is now the CEO of General Motors and appears in a television advertisement saying that GM is now “creating jobs in America.” Gee Ed that’s quite a change in philosophy from your AT&T days don’t you think? A rhetorical question obviously as the only jobs he created as AT&T CEO were in Asia.

The advice I give to everyone is to question what one sees on their telephone bill. The company billing systems are very suspect and, like me, the most knowledgeable people really don’t work for such a company. Three people I knew died from heart attacks or strokes in the seven years I was there.

The IT industry in general is not a good place to work if you are living in the United States. Labor is so less costly in places like Asia and Eastern Europe. And right now the U.S. economy faces gigantic problems in many different areas. I have detailed this elsewhere on my blog.

There is an election in the United States in November. People need to vote for those who represent their interests.