The World's Common Tater

After finishing the yard work and eating lunch yesterday I embarked on a walk with the dog. My walk is always accompanied by music from Spotify. My three months of free premium Spotify ended last week so I am back needing the internet to listen to my playlist. This is easy when I am around the house. I spend most of my days in wifi so I don’t need to worry about depending on AT&T for my music. That changes when I go for a walk.

Yesterday, soon after I turned the corner off of my street the music stopped. I thought maybe there was an issue with the app so I closed my and tried again. Still no luck. I looked again to see what the app was doing and it said I was offline. I tried something else. Still offline, I turned my phone off and turned it back on. Nothing. I assumed it was an AT&T outage. I decided to try a phone call to see if that was down as well. When I tried a call I got a message that my account was suspended and that I needed to make a payment to restart the service. I tried again to make sure it wasn’t a temporary glitch and got the same message. I resigned myself to finishing the walk without music and then contacting my wife about it when I was back in wifi. To add to the complications, I also found a closed sidewalk due to road work and had to alter my walk route. It was an eventful walk.

I made it back home and used Facetime audio to call my wife. Apparently, she had already been in contact with AT&T about the account because a charge from this debacle was still on the account. She was assured they would not suspend the account since the charge would be off the account once that was settled. It is ridiculous that it isn’t already settled. We know the phones we had to send back have been received. They suspended the account anyway with no warning. They did immediately apologize and reinstate the account when she called and put the charge in dispute so it won’t happen again. Part of me wonders if they thought we would just pay the money we didn’t owe to get the account back if they suspended it. It’s most likely just incompetence, not malevolence.

Had I not gone for a walk it might have been hours before I discovered the account issues. I likely would have found out the first time one of my kids tried to use the internet away from home. I just happened to be on a walk at the perfect time.

I do not trust that they won’t do it again. They don’t seem to know what they are doing at AT&T.