AT&T is My Friend
Over the last few months my text messaging activity has been increasing. Being a youth minister, text messaging is a primary method of communication with students. It’s also very expensive when you double your text messaging allotment for the month.
That’s right, I almost hit the 400 text mark for the month of March. Since the AT&T iPhone plan is some special plan (even though it’s really just an unlimited data plan with a fancy iPhone name) you can’t make changes to it through the online account system — I couldn’t even find out how much the text messaging levels were for iPhone plans. So today I called the handy 611 line to talk to customer service.
The girl (she sounded young and bubbly but was more than likely a 56 year old Indian man given corporate call center locations) told me that my current iPhone plan, at $20 a month, allows 200 text messages and that the next step up is the $30 iPhone plan which comes with 1500 text messages a month. Seems like a huge jump, going from 200 to 1500, but I figured it was better than paying the $20 in overage charges so she upped my plan. Then she did something completely unexpected.
Before I go on, let me say that I find it rather odd, given my almost decade-long relationship with BellSouth Cingular AT&T Wireless, that it’s reputation among gadget blogs and the greater internet population is a negative one. Gizmodo doesn’t run an AT&T story without some reference to the “evil empire” or the AT&T Deathstar. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with AT&T over the years and the girl in the call center somewhere over the rainbow was about to reaffirm that.
She waived my overage charges citing a “Customer Credit” because of my long and good-standing relationship with the company. My monthly bill closed yesterday and hadn’t officially posted yet, so she said she’d call back next week to confirm the credit and wave any additional charges. So instead of paying an additional $20+ this month I’ll instead pay an additional $10 a month for the rest of my life and in turn, text the hell out of my phone. So if you know me, look out, cause there will be texts.
But I digress. It’s not every day that a big corporation does something nice that they really don’t have to do without even being asked. So, long story short, AT&T is my friend.