I love my wife and daughter. Apparently, though, I don’t love them as much as I love retaliating against evil corporations that rip me off.
This spring I discovered that AT&T had been charging me $220 per month for an entire year that included a service upgrade that I didn’t ask for, and they never notified me of. And by “never notified me of,” I mean I’m ignoring the 10,000-word letter they snail-mailed me. It was headlined “Changes to Your Service” before switching to 4-point legalese. I could only read two sentences of it before blacking out from boredom.
The upgrade’s main feature? “Free” mobile hotspot usage—something I had paid more than a thousand dollars for and used exactly zero times. Because I wanted to save $5 a month by using autopay, I never noticed the monthly bill had ballooned by $80.
Naturally, AT&T refused to refund my $960 overpayment, so I began spite shopping for a carrier whose headquarters I didn’t fantasize about visiting with a manifesto and a suspicious duffel bag.
Verizon dangled not only a $150-per-month plan to entice me but also three shiny new iPhone 17s just for switching. I said yes faster than the first time I was offered sex. The day the package arrived was, sadly, one of the happiest of my life.
After relatively easy activation instructions, I ended up with three pairs of cell phones simultaneously occupying the same three numbers on both Verizon and AT&T.
Cool, I thought. Time to pull the plug on my ex-carrier. I called AT&T all giddy.
“Are you sure you want to cancel all three numbers?” the agent asked.
“Yes, cancel them,” I told the agent before delivering my parting TED Talk about why.
It was only after my mic-drop hangup that I realized that none of my new Verizon phones could receive calls or texts; they could only send them. By sticking it to the man, I had severed my family’s connection to the outside world.
“I will never talk to you again if you don’t get my texting back by tomorrow,” my teenage daughter declared, slamming the door to her room as she desperately sent texts that her friends couldn’t return.
Reaching down her throat and removing her liver would have elicited a look only slightly worse.
Porting Purgatory
According to Verizon, the solution was simple: Call AT&T and get the transfer authorization code I was supposed to know to enter into my new phone. (It was on the instruction sheet I didn’t follow.)
AT&T confirmed my worst fear: “We no longer have those phone numbers, sir, because you canceled your account. They cannot be reinstated.”
Verizon’s porting department insisted the numbers were in their system “awaiting activation,” so they couldn’t be used and would eventually expire.
Wasn’t this the plot of Catch-22?
Inconvenience Store
After visiting my local AT&T store to try Plan B—looking a human in the eyes and crying—I learned that I have no local AT&T store. Mine is just a franchise store, which is good only for selling phones and cases, not fixing account problems. For that, I needed a corporate store.
After driving 30 minutes, I waited another 30 minutes in line to speak to a guy who kept disappearing into the back to consult with someone more knowledgeable; someone I imagined to be wearing a wizard robe. After another 30 minutes the wizard himself, a dude wearing a disappointing gray shirt and glasses named Justin, emerged with a question.
“Exactly how attached were you to your old phone numbers?” he asked.
Old phone numbers?
Oh, I don’t know. Considering that both mine and my wife’s are tied to every important agency seeking to prove our identities via two-factor authentication, including the IRS, DMV, our healthcare plans, mortgage lender, retirement plans, and banks. I’d say pretty f***ing attached! And that’s not even factoring in the dread of informing my daughter that her father’s need for spite shopping had ruined her teenage years
Coincidentally, the AT&T corporate store shared a mini mall with a Verizon corporate store. Whatever else I was doing that day, I spent the entire rest of it ping-ponging between the two. I repeatedly received conflicting analyses of the problem and which one of the two was capable of solving it. (Spoiler alert: Each said the other was.)
Shockingly, neither store’s representatives were willing to walk just five doors down with me to debate the issue directly with their corporate enemy—especially after my joke about settling the matter naked in the parking lot with buck knives.
By Round 4 of entering each store, their staffs stopped acknowledging my presence, actively looking through me to help better customers. I watched both stores close around me.
The Hail Mary
The only good thing about large, impersonal megaconglomerates that care more about shareholders than customers is that every time you call, you get to try to wear down a new person.
On my 20th desperate phone call to AT&T, I finally reached a sympathetic agent who also possessed the dark-arts knowledge required to resurrect canceled phone numbers from scratch—provided they hadn’t been reassigned yet.
Luckily, ours hadn’t been.
Derek really was a wizard. For more than three hours, with my wife and daughter huddled together and listening on speaker, he reassured us that he would get the task done through a series of workarounds he had done only once before.
Derek thought he was saving our phone numbers. He ended up saving our family unit.
When the signal bars on our original phones finally lit up again, I wept.
