seanwilliams@attmail.com (01/10/91)
Joe Francis <llama@eleazar.dartmouth.edu> writes: | I find slamming annoying and deceitful. How often does this happen? | This happened to me in Boston under New England Tel. I was using | AT&T and suddenly received an MCI bill. I refused to pay it and | told them to switch [me] back to AT&T. I had just the opposite happen to me. When my mother and I moved into our new house we were assigned to AT&T as our primary carrier. We received a ballot sent to us by our local phone company, United Telephone of Pennsylvania. We selected MCI from the ballot and returned it to the phone company. Several weeks passed, and we began receiving mail from MCI thanking us for choosing them as our new carrier. However, we still received bills from AT&T, and when we called the 1-700-555-4141 verification number we heard an AT&T recording. We contacted MCI, and their records showed us as being MCI subscribers. The MCI representative told me that she would contact United Telephone the next day about the problem. I received a message on my voicemail the next afternoon from my MCI representative. She told me that United Telephone was very rude to her, and that United told her that *I* would have to call them. (This was obviously United's attempt to make sure I really had selected MCI.) I called United immediately, and asked them why they were rude to my MCI representative. The man on the phone apologized to me, and said that their records showed that I *had* been connected to MCI for several weeks. He said that there must have been a programming error and he contacted repair service about the problem. I was on MCI the next day. There were contradictions in what each company told me, but everything worked out as planned in the end. But this raises a few questions: 1) When I chose MCI on the ballot, was I actually connected? 2) If I was, did AT&T then tell United I changed my mind and I should be reconnected to AT&T? 3) Was there really a programming error, or was United just trying to protect me? Interestingly enough, a few days after we were connected to MCI, AT&T began calling my house. They were trying to get us back, and they asked why we left. According to my mother, they were quite forceful at times, but I guess that's just how salespeople can be sometimes. I have nothing at all against AT&T. As you can see, I use AT&T Mail as my primary connection to the electronic information world, and I happily use AT&T's new Voicemark(sm) Messaging service, although MCI has a comparable messaging system now available. Sean E. Williams seanwilliams@attmail.com