Why AT&T Pisses Me Off; an e-mail exchange.
So I forwarded the email that Dave Schumaker prepared over at gdgt to send to the AT&T CEO and the FCC Chairman. Few days later I got 2 calls from a Kevin Hicks at the Office of the President. The following email exchange signifies everything that I hate about this company with them essentially telling me to deal with it.
Kevin Hicks:
TO: Jonathan Ursenbach – We have received your email dated June 3, 2010, and would like to discuss your comments in more detail. Please feel free to reply to this email or call me at the 800 number below. I left messages for you this morning on the numbers in 5565 and 7382.
AT&T regrets the inconvenience this issue may have caused.
Hope to hear from you soon, Mr. Ursenbach.
Thanks,
Kevin F. Hicks
Me:
Hi Kevin, it’s good to hear from you. Everything in my earlier email aside, my issues with my AT&T service mainly surround the rampant lack of coverage here in San Francisco. Time and time again I have either dropped calls, lack of 3G coverage, forcing to attempt to use the inferior EDGE which never works, or just a complete lack of service.
I am currently paying $167.40 a month for service that is so spotty that I was forced to sign up for a Google Voice account so I wouldn’t lose calls or SMSes. Thankfully my new apartment in the Richmond district has service some of the time, but coverage in my old place in the SoMa district was so terrible that for the last month I was there I stopped even trying to make a call over AT&T and opted to use Skype. This shouldn’t be the way things are.
Yes things are getting better, slowly, but for the time being until the coverage issues are fixed here in SF I don’t know how much longer I can continue pay this kind of money for this kind of service.
Thanks.
KH:
Mr. Ursenbach – I appreciate your quick reply. The comments made in your initial email are very detailed, and are being taken seriously. AT&T is spending over 60 billion dollars upgrading the network to make sure your issues are addressed. In addition, the training for customer service representatives is a subject we feel is extremely important as well. I wanted to make sure you realize that these issues are important to AT&T, and your comments go a long way to facilitate those changes.
I will make sure to pass these concerns up through the AT&T Management chain, and please be advised that AT&T has appreciated your business over the years, and hopefully, in the future.
Again, your feedback and comments are regarded as priceless, and greatly appreciated.
Thanks – Kevin
Me:
That’s cool and all, but what am I supposed to do in the meantime while paying a good amount of money for something that I can rarely use?
KH:
Mr. Ursenbach – After reviewing your account notes and history, I found that you have not contacted AT&T customer care in over a year about poor coverage. Please be advised that if you are experiencing less than satisfactory cell phone service, to contact customer care by dialing 611 from your phone or 1(800)331-0500 and have troubleshooting performed. This is the most efficient way to address your technical issues. However, in some cases, customers living in certain areas may be getting the best service available at this time.
In addition, be sure to call from a different device than the one you are having problems with, and they will be happy to handle your issues. AT&T regrets any inconvenience this issue may have caused.
Thanks – Kevin
FFFFFUUUUUU
So basically this guy is just telling me to deal with it. Thanks for the help, hoss. Also a fun anecdote, since this email exchange my AT&T service has actually gotten progressively worse. Heavy sigh.
Tweet This, go fuck yourself
Howard Beale put it best when he said that he was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. This is how I feel right now after having to deal with the Tweet This WordPress plugin. Simply put, this plugin is the fucking worst. This plugin is so bad, that I’m writing my first blog post in almost two years so I can publicly rant about this and get it out of my system.
Today, the public-facing side of our WordPress installation went down. Hard. The admin panel loaded, albeit very slowly, but was still available. At first I thought the problem was Apache acting up, as per usual. Restarted Apache, no change. Time to check the database. Database is good, off to the error logs. Ah ha!
PHP Warning: fopen(http://th8.us/ttph.php?s…….. in plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this.php on line 29
PHP Warning: fread(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this.php on line 30
PHP Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this.php on line 30
Loading up http://th8.us in my browser and it times out. I try to ping it and still nothing; it’s down for the count. My immediate thought is that this plugin is opening up HTTP connections for every post for people who want to, or are trying to, share posts on Twitter. So I load up the Settings and change the default URL shortener to TinyURL and restart Apache for good measure. Load up the error logs and it’s still coming through. Try to load up the site and nothing. Joy. Time to roll up my sleeves and dive into this code.
I put on a pair of 3d glasses, because apparently this developer has never heard of, or practiced, writing readable and maintainable code, and find this nugget.
// Big brother is watching.
function tt_phone_home($status) {
global $current_site; global $wpdb; $wpv = get_bloginfo(‘version’);
$siteURL = $current_site->domain; $blogURL = get_bloginfo(‘url’);
$title = get_bloginfo(‘name’); $email = get_bloginfo(‘admin_email’);
$description = get_bloginfo(‘description’);
$lang = get_bloginfo(‘language’);
$posts = number_format($wpdb->get_var(“SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = ‘publish’”));
$settings = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT option_value
FROM $wpdb->options WHERE option_name = ‘tweet_this_settings’”);
$phone = tt_read_file(‘http://th8.us/ttph.php?s=’ . $siteURL . ‘&b=’ .
$blogURL . ‘&v=1.3.9&u=’ . $status . ‘&p=’ . $posts . ‘&t=’ .
urlencode($title) . ‘&d=’ . urlencode($description) . ‘&l=’ .
urlencode($lang) . ‘&e=’ . urlencode($email) . ‘&w=’ . $wpv .
‘&x=’ . urlencode($settings));
}
What the fuck is this shit? tt_phone_home()? It’s sending home our site URL, blog URL, installed version of WordPress, amount of published posts, blog title, description language and the administrator email. Fan-fucking-tastic. Mention of this is nowhere to be found in the plugin readme or FAQ.
If you’re going to have a plugin phone home on every page load, and not tell anybody about it or have any setting to turn it off aside from commenting it out, you damned be sure to make sure that server never goes down, or at least have your file_get_contents() call in tt_read_file() timeout instead of just sitting there opening up connections to a dead host.
Tweet This, go fuck yourself.
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