A while back I posted a picture of the six (!) identical postcards I received from AT&T on the same day.  That proved AT&T doesn’t filter their snail-mail to remove unnecessary mailings.  Here’s proof that they’re not filtering their e-mail advertising either:

Lovely AT&T advertising e-mail

There are three sections highlighted in red there.

First, they claim, “Now it’s time to upgrade your phone”.  That implies they’re checking who’s eligible for upgrades… we’ll see that they’re not.

Second, they list the “number(s)” that they claim are eligible for an upgrade.  They list all five lines on the account.  Only one of those lines is actually eligible for an upgrade; the rest of us have upgraded within the last six months and are not eligible for an upgrade for another year at a minimum.

Third, at the bottom they say “Ask about offers for other lines on this account”.  Five is the maximum.  I couldn’t add another line if I wanted to.  They do this all the time.  I regularly get e-mails from AT&T telling me I can add another line.  When I log on to my account on their website, I get an “Add another line” link, even though I can’t actually add another line.  Next time I get an e-mail telling me to add another line, I should call and demand they let me do so, and threaten to sue them for false advertising if they refuse.

Is it really too much to ask that their advertising not feel rubber-stamped?

Apple seems to think that nobody ever needs to maximize their application windows.  Instead, they provide a “zoom” button, which is supposed to toggle the window between “show as much content as possible” and a user-defined (manually set) size.

The problem is that this “zoom” button (which doesn’t actually zoom anything) is extremely inconsistent in behavior.  I draw these examples from my usage yesterday:

• Terminal and Xcode treat “zoom” as “maximize”.
• Safari tries to resize to fit content, but much of the time it’s wrong, and sometimes it fails entirely.  For example, on more than one website I clicked “zoom” and the window shrank, hiding even more content; clicking it again to try to toggle it back had no effect.  Safari seemed to do that a lot – the “zoom” button would simply do nothing, regardless of whether I had resized the window manually or not.
• iTunes treats it as a toggle between miniature mode and the user-defined size.  That’s hardly a “zoom”, now is it?

If you search the intertubes for “OSX maximize window”, you’ll find that pretty much every Mac-centric forum is populated entirely by people who believe nobody ever needs to maximize windows (never mind that some of Apple’s own apps do exactly that); the common reply to “I want to maximize this window” is “no, you don’t” and “just live without it, you’ll get used to it”.  (Yeah, because you have no choice…)

There’s something to be said for the fact that even if “maximize” is not strictly necessary, at least you always know what the button will do (speaking of the functionality in Windows and Linux).

I don’t want to argue about whether the whole UI paradigm of OSX is right or wrong, but at the very least it should be consistent…

Oh, and one other thing.  Apple, if you’re going to enforce a “no maximized windows” idea (by not supporting window maximization by default), you should at least enable snap-to-borders.

We went to sign the closing papers for our house this morning.  At 2:30 I was informed that my lender had funded the loan.  All that was left before our realtor could give us the keys was for the title company to get the recording numbers from the recording office at the county courthouse.

At 5 my realtor forwarded me an e-mail from the escrow company.  Apparently, the recording office rejected the Deed of Trust.  No, it wasn’t filled out wrong; the reason they gave was that the font is too small.

You read that right.  The font is too small.

This is absurd.  Looking at the Deed of Trust they copied for me, it appears to be a standard form; how did nobody know about this requirement?  How did none of the people processing the papers know about it?  How did none of them catch it?

This cannot seriously be the first time this has ever happened to this escrow company, can it?

If anyone out there is buying a house in King County, Washington, I suggest you make sure the escrow company processing your closing papers knows that there’s a minimum font size requirement for the Deed of Trust (and possibly other paperwork) and that they should make sure their paperwork meets those requirements.

I just called AT&T about these charges.  He refunded the $10.67 I was charged, and cancelled the subscription.

He told me that the charge was added by Verisign – confirming my googled knowledge that Jamster is at least partially owned by Verisign.  So… yet another reason to dislike Verisign.

He also added a purchase control thingy to AT&T’s MediaNET to prevent anyone from charging my phone line again without my explicit approval.

I asked why that wasn’t the default – they should automatically verify that you want these kinds of things.  His answer?  “By law we have to allow people to buy things on their phone.”

Guess what?  Verification does not in any way negate the ability to buy things on one’s phone. It was an idiotic excuse, but I didn’t want to yell at him.  After all, there wasn’t anything this particular customer service agent could do about it.

Let me be clear, though: enabling verification by default would resolve the most glaring problems with the system, and if they do that I’ll be satisfied.

So anyway I asked who I can talk to about getting AT&T to stop this sort of thing from happening on a scale larger than “we’ll refund things for whoever happens to notice and complain”.  At first he said “we have no department for that”, but after I pressed him on the issue (there must be someone I could talk to) he directed me to the “Contact Us” section of AT&T Wireless’ website.

So off I go:

…

…

… HULK SMASH THINGS.

Looks like my next course of action is to track down some fraud department number on my own, or failing that, find a VP’s (or CEO’s) phone number and leave a message for them.

Gather round, it’s story time!

Back in August 2008 I upgraded my AT&T plan from a single line to a five-line family plan.  On my second bill (dated Oct 5, 2008), one of the lines showed a charge like this:

“Flycell”… Mblox… $10.66

I called up my sister-in-law and asked her whether she had solicited the purchase.  I didn’t care if she did, but if she had I wanted her to pay for it.  Turns out she hadn’t.

So, I called up AT&T and got them to reverse the charge.  They said they would, and that they had unsubscribed the line from that merchant’s service.

Sounds simple, right?  Well, look at the next bill, dated Nov 5, 2008:

“Flycell”… Mblox… -$10.66 (refund)

“Flycell”… Mblox… $10.66

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… $10.66

Well, this isn’t looking good.  They obviously didn’t cancel the subscription the first month, because it was charged again, and now there’s a *second* subscription!  What’s worse, the contact phone number for Mblox and OpenMarket are exactly the same, so it’s the same company.

So I called AT&T again, and they told me they’d refund it and it’d all be taken care of.

Here’s the next bill, dated Dec 5, 2008:

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… -$10.66 (refund)

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… -$10.66 (refund)

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… $10.66

Hmm.  Two refunds for Thumbplay and now two charges for Thumbplay.  Unfortunately at the time I didn’t realize that I never got the refund for the second Flycell charge.

Well, it appeared to have sorted itself out, and sure enough the Jan 5, 2009 bill had no charges from either company.

… and now we get to Jan 5, 2010, this time on my line:

“XXL: Mobile content”… Jamster… $10.67

$#@*&$(*@#%$

Note that neither of us ever solicited these subscriptions, neither of us ever gave out our numbers to those “get a free ringtone” websites, and neither of us have any affiliation with any of these companies in any way.

It is, quite simply, blatant theft.  Jamster and friends throw charges at people’s lines (using their established business relationship with various mobile carriers) and just hope they won’t notice.  Some quick googling (“jamster scam” and “mblox scam” both turn up some dirt) shows that this is not uncommon.  Yes, a lot of the people who fall victim to this scam have signed up for Jamster’s “free” ringtones; but a lot of them have not, and that’s where I fall.

The problem here is that AT&T does absolutely no verification to see whether the customer actually did subscribe to these things – for some unfathomable reason, they just trust Jamster.

Well, I’m going to call AT&T tomorrow morning and get them to rectify the situation yet again.  I’m also going to chase this up the org chart as high as I can to get something done about it.

So, have any of you experienced anything similar?

Edit: here’s part two.