AT&T SUCKS
I receive a phone bill last month for somewhere around $250.
I look at it and realize that they’ve charged me for some international calls. What international calls? I gotta call AT & T and challenge this, I say to myself.
A few weeks pass. They send me a late notice. Oh, right. That damn bill.
I call and ask them about the international calls. Turns out that when I returned a business call, the number was a Canadian number. But I’d dialed 1 plus the ten digits like I would any domestic number. How the hell would I know a Canadian area code versus any other area code?
They also told me that I’d called Hawaii, and Hawaii is also billed as an international call.
The customer service representative was sweet as pie – I’ll hand them that. She said this type of thing happens frequently and what they do is generally charge first-offenders like myself the international plan rate ($15/month) and refund the difference, all the while selling you on the merits of the $15/month international plan so this type of thing never happens again.
What’s $15/month? Oh, that’s right. $180/year. Screw that.
I’m on the phone for more than thirty minutes while she dickers with analyzing my account data, etc.
She gets back on the phone and says something like this, “Geez, my supervisor’s really sorry, but we warned you about these international calls awhile back and since you didn’t respond immediately, we’re not going to help you.”
“And when was that?”
“We sent you a text message on March 28 at 7 a.m.”
So I’m sending them a return message, via this nice headline, which I’ll enclose with my next payment.
Blame Canada.
As a relatively late bloomer who couldn’t figure out how to make more than $10/hour until well past my 35th birthday (and then learned that the real way to make money is to be well-insured and then have your house burn down in a forest fire), I appreciated the following excerpt from a book review of Rich Karlgaard’s “Late Bloomers” written by Philip Delves Broughton which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week:
“Bill Walsh, the great coach of the San Francisco 49ers, got his first NFL head coaching job when he was 46 and won his first Super Bowl at 50. He was famously twitchy, self-deprecating and eager to learn, and had this to say about confidence. ‘In my whole career I’ve been passing men with greater bravado and confidence. Confidence gets you off to a fast start. Confidence gets you that first job and maybe the next two promotions. But confidence stops you from learning. Confidence becomes a caricature after a while. I can’t tell you how many confident blowhards I’ve seen in my coaching career who never got better after the age of forty.”
Speaking of bravado, you’ve gotta hand it to Mammoth Lakes Tourism (MLT) Executive Director John Urdi.
MLT is on next Wednesday’s Mammoth Town Council agenda.
It’s petitioning Council to drain $750,000 from joint reserves.
Because there’s clearly no slack in the $9 million operating budget
The most controversial ask is for $250,000 to create a “Destination Management Plan.”
DMPs basically amount to a bunch of consultants creating plans to fill bookshelves.
Lots of strategery going on, as Bush II would say.
Councilman Wentworth signaled his opposition to creating a DMP during his Councilmember report last week.
Corless scales wells of worry
Mono County Supervisor Stacy Corless experienced a pang of regret Tuesday following the conclusion of the Supes’ regular board meeting.
She feels she didn’t soeak up enough regarding Los Angeles Department of Water and Power plans to drill monitoring wells in Long Valley. Views the project as a potential Trojan horse.
Here’s what she wrote:
“On Tuesday, the panic and doubt kicked in even before I got to Conway Summit on my drive home. It was a long day in Bridgeport. There was a lot of attention and discussion at our meeting about a proposed (and ridiculous) pumped storage energy proposal on Wheeler Crest, but it was the second to last item on our
agenda, something that didn’t
warrant much public concern that has me waking up in a cold sweat,
