As hard as it may be for you to believe, I’m without internet service again. This time, the New AT&T claims that there is some power outage and that my service won’t be restored until tomorrow at 2:30pm.

You know you’ve had bad service when the tech support guy calls up your account, and, upon reading recent notes, says, “Wow, you HAVE been through a lot lately.”

I could hardly dispute such wisdom.

Fortunately, this is the 21st century, and one can blog, when necessary, from laptops and cell phones when one finds his home high-speed Internet service to be inexcusably sub-par.  And I can’t ignore the marvelous irony that I can pick up my iPhone — an AT&T Wireless product, or go to Barnes & Noble and sign on to its AT&T Wifi Hotspot for free (since I pay for home internet service) and update it as well.

I’ll be calling the billing department on Monday once again, this time to demand a credit for the time that I am without service.

And if they’re less than cooperative, I’ll point out that Comcast also offers high-speed Internet.

I’ve had nightmarish problems with Comcast in Richmond, but not here in Charleston. In any case, Comcast can’t possibly be worse than the New AT&T.

The big economic bailout plan has been described by some as putting the nation “on the brink of economic disaster.”  McCain, who supported it, seems to feel the same way about it, and according to what he says here, that’s why he voted for it.

Seriously.  Am I missing something, or is he?

I got an interesting peice of mail yesterday from a bill collecting agency hired by my apartment complex.  The amount due was more than $2,000, but it wasn’t until after I opened the letter — and after the moment of initial shock — that I realized that the bill was addressed to someone else!

Someone else who, apparently, once lived at my address.

I’ve had the displeasure of having businesses get a wrong address before: it takes months for them to get it straight if you don’t stay after them.  Stamping “No Such Addressee” on the envelope doesn’t help; I’ve tried.

So I called the number listed for this national debt collection agency.  The man on the other end answered with a simple, “Hello.”  No name of business, nothing.  Just hello.

I explained that I had received a letter at my address that was addressed to someone else, and that I wanted to let them know that there was no such person living at this address.

The guy said, “So you’re telling me that you opened someone else’s mail?”  Way to miss the point that the letter his little company sent was misdirected.  Let’s stick to the real problem here, shall we?

I resisted, though I’m not sure how I resisted, the temptation to begin my response with the words, “Look, jerk…” and said, “Yes, I sure did.  I was going through my mail and paying bills and frankly, I didn’t look at the name until I had already opened it.  But it did come to my address.  It’s not like I raided a neighbor’s mailbox out of boredom.”

“Do you see the account number?”

Oh, I thought, so now it’s suddenly okay that I opened “someone else’s” mail now that you actually need something!  Funny how that works, isn’t it?

I gave him the number and he looked it up.  He read back an address to me and asked if it was mine.  It wasn’t.

He explained — get this! — that the guy’s address had apparently changed, so they sent this to the old one.

“So then you already knew that this was the wrong address when you mailed it?”  Couldn’t let that one slide.

“Uh, yeah.  That’s just a security precaution.  You can discard the letter.”

Riiiiiiiiight.

From now on, I’ll be tempted never look at the name on a letter again.  Out of spite.  But I probably still will.

The ongoing drama with the New AT&T continues.

First, let me recap:

• In mid-July, I signed up for “Auto Draft” service, which allows the New AT&T to automatically debit the payment due from my checking account on the due date.  One less thing for me to worry about, assuming they don’t screw things up. I received an email from them thanking me for enrolling.  So they clearly knew I had done so.  Just sayin’…
• In August, I got an email saying my payment was past due.  I went to the website and saw that the payment was due.  So I attempted to pay it online and a box popped up warning me that since I was already enrolled in Auto Draft, I should not proceed with a payment because doing so could result in my checking account being debited twice.  So I followed their website’s instructions, and waited for them to just debit the money as I had previously instructed.
• They didn’t.  My telephone service was suspended.  I called — on my cell phone — and explained why I hadn’t paid, and reminded them that they had my account info:  just debit the payment and be done with it!  They informed me that it takes at least a full month for Auto Draft to kick in, no matter what the website says.  So I paid.  Phone was back on that day.
• September’s payment was due on Wednesday, Sept. 10.  They authorized a debit from my account on Thursday, Sept. 4th for the amount due plus a $30 reconnect fee for my prior month’s “late” payment.  On Saturday, Sept. 6th, they suspended my internet service for “non-payment,” despite the fact that they had already authorized the auto draft two days before that for a payment that still wasn’t due for another four days.  When I called and pointed all of this out, they told me there was nothing I could do until the billing department returned the following Monday.  I asked for a supervisor, and my internet was restored that Sunday.
• Fed up with two months’ worth of foolishness, I cancelled my home telephone service on Tuesday, Sept. 9th.

This brings me to last night, when I received an email from the New AT&T stating that I owed $82.  Eighty-two bucks for just internet service?  Yeah, something’s wrong.  Again.

So this morning I call them up and try to get answers.  It turns out that while they credited me money for the local phone service, they just went ahead and billed me through October 2nd on long distance service.  Did you catch that?  I’ve still got unlimited long distance through October 2nd on a dead phone I cancelled on September 9th.

I asked why the same computer system that could see I’d cancelled my local service and could issue a credit for that was somehow able to miss that detail on the long distance service.  She didn’t have an answer for that, which didn’t surprise me at all.  There’s no explaining a series of screw-ups this large.

And to make matters worse, they can’t correct the problem until the next billing cycle — after they just go ahead and debit the extra money they already know I don’t owe them from my checking account in October.  They’ll give me a credit in November, but they still will have shorted me in October.  Guess times must be tough at the phone company, too.

But the one good bit of news is that after the customer service rep sat through this story and read all of the notes previous reps had left as they sorted through this comedy of errors, she did credit me the $30 reconnect fee I should never have had to pay to begin with.  There’s just no way to know whether that will drop the amount they debit from $82 to $52, or whether I’ll see that $30 in November along with the extra long distance.

I don’t know what’s going on with the “New AT&T,” but I sure wish we could get the old one back.

I’m just waiting for them to send me one of those silly little surveys about their customer service.  I can’t wait to tackle the question about whether or not I’d recommend the New AT&T to my friends!

Over at WorldNet Daily, Drew Zahn writes that corporate greed and a lack of government regulation isn’t the cause of the mortgage meltdown as many are arguing.  Instead, he’s pointing a finger at too much government, in the form of (liberal) activists who pressured the government to pressure Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into unsound – though politically correct – lending practices in the early 1990s.

In other words, the zeal to make more mortgages available to minorities and those who couldn’t genuinely afford what they were getting into caused the whole thing.

Doggone those liberal, too-much-goverment types.

He quotes economics professor Stan Liebowitx, who called home mortgages “a political piñata for many decades.”

There’s just one problem with this line of reasoning.  Remember the Republican Revolution of 1994, when voters swept more elephants into Congress than you could shake a three ring circus at?  That came after the “early 1990s.”  Republicans controlled Congress back then.  Why didn’t they correct these “mistakes” way back then before the Democrats regained a majority two years ago?  If the Republicans had a dozen years to create legislation that would have prevented the problem before the current crisis ever happened, and didn’t do so, shouldn’t we ask why?

Angry that the Democrats haven’t already handled the problem?  You should be.  But they’ve only been in power a sixth of the time.  If you’re mad at their lack of results, then the GOP ought to have six times as much ‘splain’ to do.

Okay, I’ll admit it: when the iPhone first came out, I was among those who asked, “What’s the point?” I wondered why anyone would need all that stuff on a cell phone. Email? iPod? GPS? Come on! Just give me a phone that allows me to call people and I’m happy.

Then, at some point last year, I broke down and got one. It started when Verizon, the cell phone company I had been with for years, sent me a circular in the mail offering me the opportunity to buy their Voyager, which seemed to be a ripoff of the iPhone. Trouble was, when I went to the Verizon store to take them up on their offer, they told me that I wasn’t eligible for the offer since my contract wasn’t up. (The circular said nothing about that.) They told me that I’d have to buy the phone for almost twice what the circular said it would cost.

I called that the old “bait and switch.” And I told them what they could do with their little offers. And their phone service.

So, out of spite, I bought an iPhone. I quickly realized that we all actually do need all this stuff in a cell phone. No, really. We do.

If you don’t have one, you’re missing out. Trust me on that.

On the other hand, there is “too much of a good thing.” A recent report from WCBS-TV in New York calls Blackberry (and I imagine some iPhone users, too) have become a little too attached to their gadgets.

Eighty-seven percent of users say they bring their devices into the bedroom. (Insert your own joke here.) Another 84 percent say they check their emails one last time before bed, and 80 percent check them in the morning as soon as they get up.

In my case, it’s guilty, guilty and guilty.

I have a good excuse for bringing my phone into the bedroom now. Since shutting off my land line phone service — because of the New AT&T’s remarkably-inept billing department that debited money out of my account six days before the due date then suspended my service two days before the due date because they thought I hadn’t paid my bill — the cell is my only phone. In an emergency, I want it close by. And if I get a call early in the morning, I want it in the bedroom so I’m sure to hear it.

I also use it as a backup alarm clock. (Yes, it has an alarm function, too.)

As for the email thing, well, not that I get a lot of email, but when I do, I hate to miss out. Especially if it’s from one of you nice readers who have decided to comment on a post I’ve made. (Not that I’m hinting or anything.)

Most disturbing, I think, is the number of people who would choose their PDA over their spouse if they had to pick one or the other. The number’s not as high as those who take the Blackberry into the bedroom, but then it ought not be higher than zero.

So what about you? Do you take your cell phone into the bedroom? Check your email before you go to bed or when you get up? Do you consider yourself a gadget addict?

McCain actually said it:  “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

Joe Biden said this:

Here’s the transcript for those who can’t see the video:

“John McCain has confessed, and I quote - I want to make sure I get it right - he said, it’s easy for me to be in Washington and frankly be somewhat divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have. Well, he’s right. He’s right. If all you do is walk the halls of power, all you’ll hear is the wants of the powerful. Ladies and gentleman, I believe that’s why John McCain could say with a straight face as recently as this morning, and this is a quote, ‘the fundamentals of the economy are strong.’ That’s what John said. He says that we’ve made great progress economically, in the Bush years. Ladies and gentlemen, I could walk from here to Lansing, and I wouldn’t run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.”

Which argument makes more sense to you?

The gas station I normally buy from adjusted its price per gallon by about twenty cents amid the sudden panic that there would be no more gas because of Ike.  But several gas stations around South Carolina decided to take advantage of the opporunity and reportedly raise their prices above the $5.00 mark.

But now South Carolina’s attorney general is on the case.  A little-known law in South Carolina allows the attorney general to prosecute businesses for price gouging any time an emergency is declared (even in another state) by the president.  Bush declared emergencies in Texas and Louisiana last night.

This law comes into play if a commodity’s price might be affected by some sort of emergency situation, and targets businesses who raise prices too high.  There was no concrete definition provided for what makes a price high enough for prosecution, but if I owned a gas station and I raised the price per gallon by a buck or more in a single day, yeah, I’d be worried.

Well, this morning I did it:  I called the New AT&T and made my displeasure about their erroneous suspension of my internet service for non-payment of a bill I didn’t even know, their cavalier attitude about it, and their failure to follow through with a promised courtesy call, known.

And I found out one more interesting fact:  this payment that was supposed to be due tomorrow, September 10th, was ordered from my account on September 4th, two days before they suspended my service.  The money didn’t actually leave my account until Monday, but they authorized the payment through their auto-pay service on the 4th, then suspended my service two days later because they thought I didn’t pay.

That’s organization, isn’t it?

I disconnected my land line telephone service, thereby joining many people in the 21st century who haven’t had one in years.  I’ll happily rely on my iPhone for all telephone service.  (Yes, I do realize that the iPhone is also an AT&T property, but it’s out of AT&T Wireless, a division that seems completely separate and far better at customer service than the New AT&T seems to be.)

I did retain my internet service at home, and even though there’s a $5 fee for having internet service without an accompanying phone line, I don’t have to pay all of the taxes and FCC costs that go with the phone service, so I’m still ahead.  I figure, counting telephone service, the calling plan with the features I needed to block annoyance calls, and my unlimited long distance plan, I’ll be saving somewhere around $80 a month, plus about another $15 or so from cable.

That’s money I can use to pay off a credit card sooner.  I can live with that.

I received a note from my apartment complex office today that referenced the situation with Comcast, the local cable provider.  As you may recall, just days ago, I was considering the “unthinkable” action of canceling cable service to get some bills paid.  The letter says, in part:

“We have entered into an agreement with Comcast to provide its Digital Starter service as a new amenity for our residents.  You will continue to receive a monthly bill for any services and equipment that you obtain through Comcast that are in addition to the Digital Starter service.  The channel line-up for Comcast’s Digital Starter service is attached.”

What that says to me, unless I’m missing something, is that everyone gets this lineup, and since it’s a “new amenity,” it ought to be covered in the rent; that is to say, I ought to get that service for nothing.  If I subscribe to cable internet, or cable HD or cable anything-else, which I don’t, then I should have to still pay for that stuff separately.

Does anyone else read anything different?

I’m not sure that’s what they mean, but that’s how I read it.  In any event, there appears to be no way to opt out, so it is what it is.  If it’s truly free, that will save me about $50 per month.  If it’s discounted at all, I’ll take those savings, whatever they are.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, after raising a stink with the New AT&T over their abrupt suspension of my internet service when I in fact had a zero balance with my account, I was promised that my service would be restored and that I would receive a courtesy call from a billing representative by Monday morning at the latest.

It’s no longer Monday morning, as far as I can tell, in any part of the world.  The call never happened.  While my service quietly came back on hours after my call, there was no apology, no explanation, no offer for discounted service to compensate for their inconvenient blunder.

I called their billing department this evening just to find out the logistics of canceling local telephone service but keeping internet service.  I learned that if I do internet-only, it will work out to be about $50 per month.  But that beats the roughly $130 a month I’m currently paying for local telephone service, unlimited long distance (which I really don’t need), internet, and the complete choice package that allows me to block a lot of telemarketers and fax machines, but fails to block them all, anyway.

The office that would have to cancel the telephone service, conveniently, wasn’t open.  Typical.  They can take payments any time, but they restrict the time you can cut your service.  But tomorrow morning, I’ll take a leap into the 21st century by dropping my land line and maintaining cell phone service only.  (I never realized how many other people have already eliminated land line service!)

So if I’m right about the way I read the cable letter, between that and my phone service, I could be saving up to $125-130 a month, which will be a nice chunk of change to pay off a few bills early, particularly that little transmission bill.

I’m all for that.

• UPDATE:  Of course the “free” idea was far too good to be true.  Cable will be $40, but based on what I’ve been paying, that’s still about $15 bucks off the bill.  Every little bit helps, right?

Yesterday afternoon, I suddenly found myself without internet service here at home.  I’d been online a good bit of the day, writing and reading without any difficulty.  Then, at about 5:16pm, pages stopped loading.  Email stopped coming in.  Errors began popping up, advising that this page or that page was not responding.

I checked the little modem supplied to me by the New AT&T, which took over Bellsouth, and noticed that the internet light was red instead of green.

I unplugged the modem, waited about ten seconds, and plugged it back in, knowing that if I call them, this is one of the first pieces of advice their tech support people would offer.  (In TV, we call the act of turning something off and then back on again the “primary engineering solution” because that’s generally the first thing that’s tried, no matter what the problem actually is.)  In this case, the internet was still out.

So I called the tech support line and after entering my telephone number, I received a recorded message that my account had been “referred to billing which was closed for the day.”  I soon learned that billing on Saturday closes at 5:30pm, and they suspended my internet service at 5:16pm.  They’re not open on Sunday, so Monday morning would be my first opportunity to find out what was wrong.

But if you know me, then you know that I’m not the kind to sit back and wait patiently until Monday.

The other odd thing is that back in July, I signed up for the New AT&T’s convenient auto-draft service, which means that each month, when my bill is due, they just automatically deduct it from my checking account.  That way there’s never a late payment and it’s one less thing I have to worry about.

Except for last month, when they suddenly suspended my telephone service — that time it was just the phone, the internet worked fine — for “non-payment.”  I called, pointed out that I had already signed up for the auto-draft service, and was told that the auto-draft service takes more than a month to begin, so that my payment that should have been auto-drafted wasn’t.  “It would have been nice,” I suggested, “if somewhere on the confirmation email that welcomed me to the auto-draft program, it pointed out this little delay.”  The operator agreed and apologized.  She then assured me that the September payment, which she said was due on September 10th, would be auto-drafted and there would be no problem.

So here I was, on September 6th, (which most of us would likely agree occurs before September 10th has a chance to roll around), with no internet service and the accusation that I was somehow a deliquent.

I called the tech support number back and when it asked for my phone number, I said, “Agent.”  This eventually got me to a human being, albeit a human being with a thick foreign accent that made the conversation more difficult.  This person, after suggesting several tricks to try to get the internet service back up, finally looked up my account and told me it was a billing issue.  I explained the whole auto-draft thing and she said that there was no way she could access that information with my account since she was tech support only.

I then asked the big question, one that they’re probably sorry I asked:  “If I drive myself to my office, go online there, and pay whatever amount the New AT&T seems to think is past due, will that get my service restored automatically?”

She told me she couldn’t promise that, but that it was a possibility.

So I drove to work, signed on to the New AT&T’s convenient online account management system, and was met with the following piece of information:

BILL SUMMARY:

Due Date:  September 10

Current Balance:  $0.00

I actually printed out that page before I left work, and went back home to get back on the phone with tech support.  Needless to say, I was livid.  Livid because I knew I didn’t have a past-due balance, livid because I had taken the step two months ago of signing up for auto-pay so that there was no way a past-due balance was even possible, and livid because they cut my service while accusing me of not paying a zero balance that isn’t even due for another four days!

And the irony that since they now have my checking account number, and can now auto-draft my payment when it is due, and could therefore have automatically drafted whatever they thought was past due without cutting my service, was not lost on me, either.

I immediately asked for a supervisor this time around, explained the problem, read off the information from the printout, and said that waiting until Monday for the correction of a screw-up that was clearly not my fault was thorougly unacceptable.  The supervisor promised to send an emergency email dispatch to a billing manager, and that I should expect a courtesy call back between now and Monday morning.

Within the hour, my internet service suddenly, magically, inexplicably came back on.  The little red light became green again, like the dawn of a new day.  And as for the couresty call, it has yet to occur.

No explanation.  No apology.  Nothing.

I’m sure they’ll blame some random computer glitch.  I’m sure it won’t be anyone’s fault.  But I think they owe me the courtesy of that much at the very least.  And I’m sure they’re going to like it if I have to be the one to make the first contact on Monday morning.

Remember that little song?  I thought of it this morning.

Because I forgot to pay my phone bill.

Actually, I didn’t forget to pay it…I just got the due date for that bill confused with the due date for my electric bill.  The new AT&T, which doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement over the old one, and which delights in emailing me any time there’s something they want me to spend more money on, didn’t email me to warn me that my phone service was about to go bye-bye.

But this morning, the phone was suddenly out of service.  Still thinking I had a few days before the bill was due, I started my day and checked my email blissfully unaware that my phone had been “temporarily disconnected” until I got a call on my cell from mom, who told me that she couldn’t get through.

So I signed on to my account and checked:  sure enough, it was past due.  (Oddly enough, the same bill also covers online service, but this worked without a problem.)  So I authorized a payment of slightly more than was past due, just to show them that it was an honest mistake and that I meant to rectify it quickly and completely.

Then came the error:  “Your account requires special handling.  Please call AT&T at….”

Call?  With what?

Naturally, I didn’t call them until I got to work; I don’t do account information over a cell phone.  And as for “special handling,” they took the same information I gave their website.  They had no answer about exactly what kind of “special handling” they were performing.

Or why their site didn’t just cooperate to begin with rather than directing me to use a phone that it knew didn’t work.

South Carolina has dropped out of an ad campaign that was designed to lure gay tourism dollars to the state. The state’s Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department had previously agreed to spend $5,000, not a huge amount of money as ad dollars go, to market to gays in London.

Charleston’s Post and Courier describes one ad that appeared in a London tube station as showing a historic rural home under the headline, “South Carolina is so gay.”

True to form, bible-belt red-state South Carolinians reacted by flying off the deep end. Sure, they want tourist dollars, but just not from them. Even though “them” is a relatively powerful tourist force, according to a Philadelphia study a few years ago, which revealed that for every dollar that city spent on gay tourism advertising, gay tourists spent an average of $153 on hotels, shops and more. At the time, gay tourists were said to spend about $54 billion a year on travel. That’s billion. With a B.

And it’s just a guess on my part, mind you, but I’ll wager those billions are still green like everyone else’s. And still spends, in a sluggish economy, the same.

The problem, according to PRT excuses, was that international advertising wasn’t subjected to the same review process that national advertising is because in this case, a third party firm developed the ad. Does that explanation make any damn sense to anyone? PRT only cares enough to be mindful of the image it is projecting to places like Iowa or Oregon or Minnesota, but doesn’t give a hoot about pulling in tourism dollars from the rest of the planet? And unless PRT has its own ad agency and never uses any third party firms here in the state — which is unlikely — most of their ad projects are ultimately produced or executed by third parties.

And isn’t that what we’d expect, no matter what an international ad said? Who’d know what would appeal to any specific segment of London’s population better than a London-based firm, or at least someone here is from there?

Sounds to me like an excuse about as logical as something a kid would make up after getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Is the ad wrong to use the term gay? Well, let’s look at it this way: would there be any objection from gay groups if South Carolina hoped to attract bible belt tourists to the state with the line, “South Carolina is so straight?” If anyone would have a problem with that, but not the gay line, then what we’re dealing with here is a nice little double standard.

Of course, then there are the ones who’ll try to downplay the whole thing by hiding behind dictionary definitions. Gay has different meanings, they’ll say.

True.

Gay means happy and carefree, although it is used less and less for that these days because “them homasexshals” took over the word.

Gay is also used, mostly by people who aren’t, to refer to something that is screwed up, backwards.

Some would argue after this little display of homophobia and/or sloppy procedure and/or poor judgment, depending on your personal point of view, that maybe, one way or another, the headline isn’t so inaccurate after all.