Cingular is Stinky

I'd always liked Cingular/ATT, if nothing else but for their service area. But damn, how bad can your customer service be? Today I noticed that I've been getting charged for receiving text messages. I don't ever send them because I don't want to get charged for it. Of course just charging for texting is about as lame as it gets, but it seems that a number of carriers are on that bandwagon. So I called them up since I didn't get charged for texting from ATT and didn't get charged in the past for just receiving them, anyhow the woman on the phone was pretty rude about it, insisting that they always charge for receiving messages, even though their website states to the contrary... She even pulled up the same pages that I did, and read back items that were not on the page, adding words that weren't there... After she gave me a credit and blocked text messaging (it's the only way to avoid the charges) she hung up on me... Nice.

Folks I work with and relatives have even worse problems, where they open an account and then get billed for completely different plans, and then when they call they get treatment similar to mine, or worse, they've often been told that there is nothing that can be done. I don't really understand the business model of stick it to your customer... There's a reason for Cingular's poor loyalty rating and this is it. I'm happy to pay the money, I'd just like some service to go with the dollars I'm spending.