Wha Ha Happened!?

You may have noticed that recently I have been online less and less. Part of this is because I am working on new designs and the other part is because I am trying to prepare for fall.

But yesterday in particular it was because of AT&T.

You see, My neighborhood is in the middle of a service provider price war. When we moved here our only option was Insight. Being people who love options we weren't thrilled but we dealt with it. After a while our television would cut in and out.Eventually during a program the screen would go black and there would be no more television for the rest of the evening. Which in some ways is great - it would keep us from vegetating in front of the idiot box for too long. But again there goes those options we like to have.

Finally AT&T seemed to have found a way to loosen the tight grasp of Insight on our neighborhood and sent people around to get us to switch. Less money and a DVR? Yessir I'm interested in switching!

To remotely protect the man who came to our door to convince us to switch I will not say exactly what practice was used, but I will say he went out of his way to make sure we got our serviced by circumventing requirements to do so. And he also made it clear that if they knew, he would be terminated.

For a lower bill + DVR we switched and it was a magical time filled with me doing my damnedest to catch up on shows I was behind on and new shows just beginning their lives.

Not unlike what happened to use a few years ago with the Ohio State campus area WOW/Time Warner Big10 network wars we began getting lots of mail from our old provider begging us to come back.

Insight sent one of their fella's around last week and I was already fully prepared to have none of whatever he was peddling and send him on his way. Thankfully, instead of giving him an earful (it's not his fault we had the issues we did last time and he was very, very polite), I chose to talk with him about the price war. He asked why we left in the first place. When I explained to him about the all too frequent loss of the use of our televising he was surprised (but I doubt he'd say, "Oh yes, you'll have that when you choose us"). I also made sure to let him know that we were quite fond of the DVR option, to which he quickly told me that if that was what we wanted it was absolutely no
problem.


Now instead of just running off and switching once more we did what we thought was the next best step to make. We called and spoke with AT&T about Insights visit and asked if they were changing any package deals. At no point in time did we say "we are thinking of switching providers" or anything of the sort. We just wanted to know what was going on on AT&T's end.

The very next day our television and Internet was suspended.

So I write this now in Notepad while I wait for the Insight man to set up our television and Internet once again. This time under a "win back" package which will cut our cable/Internet bill in half.