AT&T does not do Catch and Release. They hold you hostage from the moment you sign on with them, until someone pries your cellphone from your cold, dead hand.
At the end of December, I changed my phone service from AT&T to Xfinity. Xfinity has my WiFi account, and Xfinity, which is part of Verizon, offers much lower rates than AT&T. They also offer “free” iPhone 17 Pro phones when you switch.
It was a no-brainer, except when they first offered a truly free phone, and a ridiculously low rate in April, I over-brained it, and gave in to entropy. I’ve been with AT&T since my son was old enough to have a cell phone, and he is now thirty-two.
My son is on my plan because it’s a business plan, and he consults with me on social media, and website building and management for my business. In other words, he’s a write-off, much like when I could use him for a Child Tax Credit, only now he’s 6′ 5″ instead of 3′ tall.
We both wanted the new iPhones. Because of course we did. The editing capabilities are phenomenal, and he and I are both content creators. I can justify any new, shiny expense. Especially if I can use it as a write-off.
If I’d done it when Xfinity first offered, our shiny new toys would have been completely free. Since I procrastinated, as usual, we “only” received insanely high rebates for our trade-in phones. Still.
The new service with Xfinity will be at least $100 less a month than my AT&T bill. That’s $1,200 a year, which I can spend on frivolous things, such as three car payments or half of a one-month mortgage payment. We’re rich, I tell you, rich.
What did it take to amass these savings? Hours and hours and hours of my and my son’s life.
We spent over two hours in the Xfinity store the day after Christmas to switch service and get my new phone, complete with the sales guy doing all the work of canceling AT&T, switching all my information from the old phone to the new phone, and providing me with the material to mail my old phone back. I had to stretch out on one of the couches first, probably looking as if I had passed out, to get a manager to hurry over to start the process, but ultimately it went relatively quickly.
I was happy with my shiny, new, regular sized iPhone 17. My son, though, with his considerably larger hands, wanted the Max version. It’s a bigger iPhone 17 that I can’t wrap my hand around, but which looks normal-sized in his. For that, of course, we had to wait.
The phone had to be ordered, and mailed to me, then I had to mail it to him, then I had to email him the instructions to switch his phone and service, which were first emailed to me. Talk about a game of Telephone.
He followed the instructions. He even followed the instructions again with me on the line walking him through what was in the email, and what the Xfinity person told me to do when I had to call them after the emailed instructions failed.
He kept getting an error message saying AT&T would not release his telephone number to be transported.
Well played, AT&T. Put a mythical porting hold on a phone so it, or at least the phone number, can’t be ported to another carrier. Which means nothing on the old phone can be ported to the new phone, either.
As the good — okay, maybe helicopter — mom I am, I offered to call AT&T. My son works on commission, and he had already spent two hours on the phone with both AT&T and Xfinity.
Another cute trick of AT&T is that only the owner of the business can make any changes, so I spent over an hour on the line with AT&T. I requested the AT&T person call an Xfinity person while I was on the line, and confirm with them that the ransom had been paid, proof of life secured, and my son’s number was free to go. They both assured me it was handled. My son tried to activate his new phone again. It didn’t work.
If I could have transported myself all the way to the island or third world country where the service agents are, I would have. I’m little, but I can be intimidating face-to-face. Since I can’t physically teleport yet, I made do with calls.
For another hour-and-a-half I was on the phone with at least three real people at AT&T. The fact that they are real people did not make things easier. Every transfer meant I had to provide my son’s phone number, my now cancelled business account number, my number, now serviced by Xfinity, and every transaction I had ever had with AT&T in twenty years of “service” with them.
Each new person assured me there was no hold on porting my son’s number over to Xfinity. Finally, I insisted the last AT&T person call an Xfinity person while I was on the line.
Progress! After AT&T hung up, the Xfinity person told me all the steps to transport the number. I wrote them down. I took a photo, with my amazing new phone camera, of what I wrote down, and texted it to my son.
It didn’t work.
He called me, we called AT&T together, and we spent forty minutes on a call with a representative who consistently called my son Blank. His name is Blake. By the end of the call, I was calling him Blank.
She assured us over and over, between holds while she talked to the fraud people, the porting authorization people, and her little dog we could hear in the background, that “Blank’s” number was free to scamper over to Xfinity.
We insisted she call Xfinity, explaining to her that we had been through all of this before, including her colleague calling and speaking with Xfinity, and we were no longer taking anybody’s word for anything.
After several attempts with Xfinity not answering, she assured us again that the number was now transferable, and that, in fact, my son’s number was now no longer being serviced by AT&T.
I’ll bet you can guess what happened next. The number still wouldn’t transfer to his new phone. So now, he had no phone service at all. Not with AT&T, and not with Xfinity. In effect, he no longer existed in the world of communications. Maybe that’s why she called him Blank.
Fortunately, my son has a work computer with a built-in phone. He called me on it, and because the call was from Los Angeles, I answered. I never answer unknown numbers. Must have been mother’s intuition. When I answered, I didn’t immediately recognize his voice, and asked for what purpose this supposed stranger wanted to connect me to a three-way call.
I actually do not remember who that final three-way call was with. My brain, and his, were fried by then.
I think it was Xfinity, because we were ASSURED that his number was now transferable, and “All he had to do was…”. Nothing that starts with that sentence goes well.
An hour later, he calls again on his computer, to inform me the new phone still wasn’t working. I was now dinner and two margaritas in, and we decided to deal with it again tomorrow.
Fortunately for both AT&T and Xfinity, the transfer went through the next morning. Fortunately, because my son and I were exceptionally polite with all 250 customer service people we dealt with the day before, and our reserves of patience and politeness were drained.
Our pocketbooks were also drained. He works on commission. If he’s not making calls, and if I’m not seeing a client, or writing, we aren’t making money.
I figure between us, that savings of $1,200 a year we got by switching to Xfinity, cost us at least eight hours of productivity. Those eight hours could have netted us around $700 each, if used for our work.
If you’re doing the math, it isn’t mathing. We lost around $200 total, after the “savings” from Xfinity.
At least we have new phones to show for it. Now to get busy using them to make content, which we hope makes money, or at least recoup our loss of $200.
We can dream.
—
This post was previously published on MuddyUm.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
 Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box |
 |
 |
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Photo credit: iStock
