How AT&T gives the middle finger to its departing “Valued Customers”
Oct 29Here’s the exchange I just had with AT&T:
me: Hi, I’d like to cancel my AT&T mobile account.
ATT: Sure, I’ll be happy to help you with that. Now, since your contract is not up, an early termination fee will apply.
me: Yeah, I’d like to avoid the termination fee. My contract expires on November 1st, can I schedule the account cancellation date for November 2nd, so I don’t have to pay the $175 early termination fee?
ATT: Sure, we can cancel then. You can cancel your account anytime. Do you want to cancel on the last day of your billing cycle?
me: No, my billing cycle just ended on Oct. 23rd, and the new billing cycle just began a few days ago. I’d like to cancel my account on November 2nd, since my contract ends on November 1st. Can I can cancel on the 2nd and just be charged a pro-rated amount for the week or so of service that I’ll use?
ATT: I’m sorry, we don’t pro-rate the final bill.
me: So you’re going to charge me for a full month of service for only one week of use, even though my account would be cancelled on the 2nd?
ATT: Um, yes.
…
The conversation ended with me explaining that I was not expecting to be charged for a full month of service for one week of use and that I’d call back once I had decided on a cancellation date.
The real kicker is that one of the last things the lady I was talking with told me was “… and, Mr. Ellis, you are a valued customer, and you will have 45 days (I don’t remember the exact number) to re-open your account if the other carrier doesn’t work out.”
Gee, thanks.
The essence of this conversation is:
me: I’d like to cancel my account.
ATT: Sure, we’d be happy to do that, you !*%&^!%!, I mean, valued customer. By the way, we’ll be charging you for service that you won’t be receiving. Thank you and have a nice day.
Colony (2nd weekend)
Oct 15I finally have a functioning prototype. It’s incomplete, but I’m checking in what I’ve got.
You can enqueue simple tasks and have them run on a distributed work queue. Once a task is queued, the client can either poll for the computed result, or it can block until the result is available.
Now I’m going to add in the functionality that allows completed tasks to call a callback function once the task is complete.
If you’re interested, check out http://github.com/davidkellis/colony.
Colony
Oct 09Today I’m going to try to start and finish a rough version 1 of a distributed task system that I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s going to be in Ruby. Keep me accountable; ask me how close I am to finishing it here in a few hours.
The git repo is at http://github.com/davidkellis/colony.
Ok, time to get started…
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) 2.1
Sep 19Taxonomy schemas in the DTS are those:
1. referenced directly from an XBRL instance using the schemaRef, roleRef, arcroleRef or linkbaseRef element.
This seems contradictory to me. The spec says that linkbaseRef elements can refer to Taxonomy schemas, but later the spec says that the purpose of linkbaseRef elements is to reference linkbase documents, not Taxonomy schemas.
“Like”
Jun 16This whole Facebook “like” thing is getting out of hand. Facebook keeps recommending things to me that other people “like”. You know what other people like? Books. Not specific books, just “books”. You know what else people like (or so Facebook tells me)? They like “country music”. Not particular artists, not particular songs, but “country music”. How do you tag an arbitrary thing that you “like”? I don’t even know. When I figure it out, I’m going to “like” air. Then I’m going to like “breathing”. I might go so far as to “like” The can.
Eyes And Feet and more: Turbo-boost your WiFi signal – in 15 minutes
Jun 10Eyes And Feet and more: Turbo-boost your WiFi signal – in 15 minutes.
Cool! Build your own parabolic antenna adapter using a cut-out pattern, aluminium foil, paper, glue, and a knife.
