At work we have AT&T for a ton of money. In one of my homes I gave an unlimited internet line and unlimited international phone for $35 a month through Time War er.
At work we had regular AT&T lines and DSL. I wanted to save money so I got rid of two lines and put one line and Internet on a uverse account
They F’d it up. Transferred internet over involving a number we never heard of and for some reason ended the business number we had for 35 years.
After days of turmoil we got the number back and the Internet was placed on our account line.
We get now by AT&T collection calls about a bill every other month we never had the number for. So every 8 weeks I have to make sure they fix this and don’t send this to the credit companies to ruin the businesses credit.
All that happened by just dropping two lines and taking the DSL to their digital.
OK. . . . that would explain the pricing you got. You got connected to their minuscule "Fairy Godmother Department" that is usually closed or on vacation, but when it is, will do the right thing and do it quickly to make up for everything the "Department of Dirty Tricks" and the "Departments of SNAFU and FUBAR as Usual," all three of which are open 24/7, have already done to you.
With the billing problem, It sounds like the little old lady who is the sole employee in the "Fairy Godmother Department" went back to her knitting or had another one of her Alzheimer attacks before she finished cleaning up the mess that the "SNAFU" department had made in your billing, though.
My elder daughter is not a person you want to cross. At age 23 she already was hell on wheels competent (she had advanced to become the #3 person in a company of over 500 people), when-- this was some 17 years ago-- got into an argument with AT&T. After having her phone number for four years, AT&T had arbitrarily decided to sell her very desirable home phone number (hers ended in 1000) to a commercial company and give her a new phone number without any notice. They did not even bother tell her what her new number was! Her family, friends, work just suddenly got connected to a new pizza parlor every time they tried to call her, leaving all of them except work with having no way to get a hold of her except through mail, email, or at work.
After going around and around with AT&T, my daughter learned what had happened. AT&T sent her a written apology from the PRESIDENT of AT&T which included an agreement to not bill her for her home phone for a year as part of the apology. They also agreed to send letters of explanation from AT&T to a list of her friends and businesses she would provide.
Six months later, when her first bill under the new number finally arrived. She discovered to her horror that someone had interpreted the president that they only were only deferring BILLING her for those twelve months. . . and she had a bill for a full 12 MONTH'S SERVICE and it was all DUE AND PAYABLE RIGHT NOW! In addition, they were billing her for a business DSL line she did not have, which in fact, was not at her address, or even in our state!
Did I tell you my daughter is not one to be in an argument with? They tried to argue that she did not have any such agreement, that she did indeed own and use the DSL line on an out-of-state phone number her name was not even attached to associated with a large corporation, they hung up on her, they said she had to pay the bill before she could put in into dispute (with the business DSL line it came to several thousand dollars), they tried everything in their arsenal to get her to go away. She also kept track of her time. . . and sent an itemized bill to the president of AT&T for over $800 for her time she had spent on the phone trying to straighten out THEIR mess, along with a copy of the president's apology letter and a copy of the bill they had sent her; AT&T paid the bill she sent.