AT&T is so messed up

We are long-time AT&T customers and have cellphones, (had) a home phone, still have internet and we were DirecTV customers. So when AT&T purchased DirecTV, we thought we should do the combined billing both to make it easier for us and we hoped we'd get a discount in the process.

Sadly, the discount was only $10/month but hey, that's better than nothing. Unfortunately, we are totally paying extra for this mistake. Since making that change, our billing has been mishandled and at this point, after at least 3 phone calls and several chat sessions, the amount we owe is unknown.

Conveniently, whenever I login to any of my AT&T services, I always get redirected to the same place. This page shows that we owe $376.53.  If I click "view paper bill", I see we owe $333.63.  If I go to history, I cannot find the payment we made to AT&T Uverse for $215.53.  Seriously, I have no idea how much I actually owe them.  Between the DirecTV deal and the combined billing, some of the bill says that the charges were not received in time.

As you can imagine, I've been on hold a bunch waiting for someone to come online. Interesting that no matter what time of day/night I call it's "higher than normal" wait times. Huh. You'd think they could hire someone in the roughly three weeks I've been dealing with this problem.

Pretty annoying how they continually tell me to go to the web to view and pay my bill. Not only did they make it hard for me to get to the point where I could wait on hold but now some automated voice continually comes online to tell me to go to the web. Of course I went to the web first! Who wants to wait on hold or talk to someone who's first language isn't English?

It's as if I'm being punished for being one of those who naturally go to the web and avoid using the phone.  After all, why would AT&T spend so much time trying to steer me to to the web unless there were, in fact, a ton of people who are not web savvy enough so they just call AT&T.

Clearly, AT&T does not have service in mind as they go FAR out of their way to avoid spending money on actual people to provide it.

And the fact that the billing is so messed up is also and indication of their lack of investment. They spent $49 BILLION (yes that's not a typo) on purchasing DirecTV. Obviously, they can't afford to spend a little  more to make that a round 50 bill to have setup the systems to properly integrate the billing and provide support.

Well, this has been fun. Waiting on hold and typing into this blog has kept me from doing other work. I know no one will read this and it won't make any difference but there's a part of me that wishes I had some voice and that someone was listening.