Last week I got a call from AT&T, droning that my account was very overdue, and with that highly trained “When you will be able to make payment, Mr. Portigal?” – very confusing because of course I had been paying all my bills. Went and pulled the bill (yeah, I keep all that stuff) and it turns out I’m on automatic debit. So…I call them up and go through the usual voice mail hell and multiple people and eventually I am told “You were removed from automatic pay on /date/” – What?????????

I was a little uppity and demanded to know why they hadn’t let me know I was removed, so that I could make some other arrangement to pay my bill before it became overdue? They had no answer. They didn’t know why I had been removed, but they saw that it had not been paid for 2 months or more, despite being set to “automatic pay.” Did AT&T screw up? Or did Wells Fargo (imagine that?) cause the problem. I have no idea.

Now I’ve got to re-enroll (someday, when the damn form comes in the mail) in automatic pay.

After I hung up from the lousy support person, I went to the mailbox and there was yet another bill, telling me I was overdue, and had been removed from Automatic Pay. It then said “a letter explaining this will arrive shortly.”

No such letter has arrived.

What a broken system!