How many times can an AT&T representative blatantly lie to me, hang up on me, or tell me that I'm lying? Well, practically any time I call the the "customer care" phone number. I have a revised final bill saying I owe AT&T $15, two months after my account has been cancelled. Now, before I get into my most recent experience with AT&T, let me explain what cancelling our service was like. When my husband and I moved and had to cancel our service (because our new apartment could not get DSL internet) it took 10 hours on the phone over the course of two days with AT&T just to get it cancelled. Most of that time was spent on hold. This is not an exaggeration - we went back and checked our phone records and added it all up. When we cancelled it, we were threatened by the cancellations department representative with early termination fees, even though AT&T could no longer provide the service we had signed a contract for. He basically acted like I was lying or just stupid and told me it didn't matter, I would be charged an early termination fee. Another 3 or 4 more hours on hold to speak to a supervisor, and we finally got it cancelled.

So now, I get a bill in the mail in October for 15 dollars. It said this would be automatically drafted from my account. We cancelled our account on August 4th. Now, when I cancelled my account, I assumed that meant AT&T would be deleting my credit card and other personal information from their system as well, but apparently not. So I call the billing department (which is a call center not located in the US). Speak to a woman I can barely hear over people yelling in the background. I tell her my situation and she asks for my account number (since the bill I received had a different account number on it). I give her MY account number and she tells me that its not right. I have the paper sitting right in front of me and she continues to argue with me about my account number. So then I ask her for her supervisor. Who says all he can do is take my payment for the bill, but can't explain to me why I owe money or why there is a different account number on the statement I received.

So, I get off the phone with them, call the call center in the US. I speak to a representative and ask for a supervisor. I'm told the supervisor is busy, but can return my call in 15 to 25 minutes. So I leave my contact information and wait for the call. Three hours later, no phone call. So I call back. Speak to a different representative who apologizes, puts me on hold, then comes back and says she'll transfer me to someone who can help me. After waiting 10 minutes on that transfer, the hold music stops playing, I say "hello" but no one answers, and then I hear a "click", like someone hung up on me. The phone call ends. So I call back again, speak to yet another representative. He seems rather irritated that I'm so upset. He doesn't know who the other representative was transferring me to and acts like I'm being unreasonable because I was upset about not receiving a call from the first supervisor who was supposed to call me. So he takes my information, and promises me that his supervisor will contact me within 24 hours.

That was last week. Guess how many supervisors from AT&T have actually contacted me? Not ONE. Are your representatives trained to lie to people who have complaints just to get them off the phone? Because it seems to be a pretty common theme. I want to speak to someone about this bill who can do something to resolve this issue. I will NEVER be a customer of AT&T again and I have warned anyone and everyone I get the opportunity to warn to stay far far away from AT&T. I hope its worth the $15 to lose a customer for life. I'd pay twice as much for Comcast now just so I don't have to deal with AT&T's customer service.

However, right now, I still unfortunately do have to deal with customer service because I refuse to pay this bill until I speak to a supervisor or someone who can explain EXACTLY why I owe this and why my credit card information wasn't removed from the system 60 days ago when my account was cancelled (since my bill was already paid at that point).