Sunday at Best Buy, it took two Best Buy employees and three AT&T employees to come to the conclusion that nothing could be done to add a cell phone for my daughter to our existing Family Talk Plan, because I had Combined Billing (land and wireless lines on the same bill), and the Combined Billing department was not open on Sunday.

Alison and I arrived back at Best Buy at 3:45 pm Monday, and started over. Really started over, because neither Best Buy employee we had dealt with on Sunday was there, and the person who was didn’t seem to pay attention to anything I said and so repeated all the same issues we had Sunday, instead of starting with the Combined Billing department. It appeared that I was more familiar with the web interface to AT&T than she was. After about 20 minutes on hold, she finally got through to a person at Combined Billing. They spent the next five minutes arguing over whose system made more things impossible, until I finally mentioned the concept from the day before of “unbundling” the billing so the line could be added. In the midst of this, we once again changed Best Buy employees, this time for the better.

With the Combined Billing rep on hold, she then contacted another AT&T rep as the multitude of false starts on this seemed to have scrambled their credit approval process. We were finally thinking that my daughter might have her phone AND be on time for work, when the contract appeared on the screen. Instead of being an additional line on the existing plan for $9.99, it was a whole new plan at $39.99. At this point I took Alison to work, and when I got back to the store 30 minutes later, the Best Buy rep was just hanging up with the AT&T rep and printing out the THIRD version of the contract. She also showed me the credits that had been applied to my account to correct the mistaken charges from the first two contracts.

So, over two days, we had four Best Buy Employees, seven AT&T employees, and the two of us. Thirteen!

Oh, and I still have to call Combined Billing back tomorrow and get the billing bundled again…

  1. Ahhhhhh, Best Buy. After having some computer problems our computer said that we had a virus on the work station. Because we did not have the time to deal with it and the fact that the computer was still working, “someone” called Geek Squad! The next day a Geek showed up at my front door claiming that they had misquoted the price of the service.
    Instead of $149 it was going to be $250 to tell me that we had a virus. (The $149 was the price to load new software).
    Lets get this straight, for $250 you will tell me that I have a virus and not fix the problem??
    At this point I did NOT let the person in the house and suggested he cancel the appointment! Good Bye Geek

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