You don't always know whom you're going to annoy.
But if you're going to annoy a customer, it's probably unwise to annoy someone who's won the George Polk Award for legal reporting.
Yet here we are with AT&T[1] twiddling its thumbs over here and Josh Marshall, the celebrated journalist behind -- and atop -- Talking Points Memo[2] over there, tweeting urgently with, one imagines, several fingers and perhaps a slight snarl.
What, you might wonder, has AT&T done? (This time.)
Well, here's how Marshall began his tale on Twitter[3]: "Oh cool, @ATT charging me a second time for the same iPhone. I don't know how this whole company doesn't get shut down for fraud. Their whole business model appears to be based on false credit card charges and wearing people down with phone trees and bad customer service."
Hours And Hours To Say The Phone's Not Ours.
That sounds a touch dramatic, you might muse. But then judge it against the details.
Marshall said his wife had returned an iPhone[4] she bought to AT&T. Somehow, the company acted as if she hadn't.
Last Tuesday, he said of his wife: "She spent days on the phone with them, getting promised she wouldn't be billed. Only to have them try to do it again a month later. Can't emphasize enough, multiple days in which she spent literally 4 or 5 hours on the phone over the course of a day. Thought this was resolved after we gave them proof for like the 9th time. Then this afternoon I get an email (not sure why to me, though we're on the same overall account) saying we're charged again."
Of course, AT&T interrupted Marshall's tweeting with a