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AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#42Only where AT&T is involved could we rush to the defense of IE6.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be a good rule for calling any cable/phone ISP. The last time I mentioned using a Mac the support person ignored that I had already tried pinging certain gateways to check connectivity, and proceeded to condescendingly walk me through going to Applications->Utilities->Network Utility so that I could run ping from a tab there. Of course I quit after 15 min of this, tried to access again in a couple hours…
I'll add Rule 1A: Never talk net-speak with tier-1 support . "I've run some traceroutes and packets are getting lost at your router in Elmhurst. When I do get through, ping times are over 700 millseconds" "Okay, sir, what I'm going to need you do to is close your browser and restart it"
I'll add Rule 1A: Never talk net-speak with tier-1 support.
If only "shibboleet" worked in real life...
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#44Rule #1 when calling AT&T DSL support: Always, ALWAYS say you're running Windows with IE. Lie. Fake it. Whatever. If you say anything else you'll derail your support. Your goal is to get through the level 1 did-you-plug-everything-in-lets-restart-your-machine gauntlet. That, or go to the forums at dslreports.com and hope you can contact a sympathetic AT&T engineer.
This seems to be a good rule for calling any cable/phone ISP. The last time I mentioned using a Mac the support person ignored that I had already tried pinging certain gateways to check connectivity, and proceeded to condescendingly walk me through going to Applications->Utilities->Network Utility so that I could run ping from a tab there. Of course I quit after 15 min of this, tried to access again in a couple hours…
I had to setup AT&T DSL last week. The modem itself didn't have a connection (blinking DSL LED, no Internet LED), and I made the mistake of mentioning to the tech that I was using an Apple router instead of the Cisco router they sent me. He stopped investigating the problem right there and the only thing he would do for me was transfer me to Cisco support for the router even though I expressly stated that there was no problem with the router.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption that ATT needs to do it, is like assuming that a website needs to use cookies - it doesn't follow the money. The article implies that this process costs ATT millions, whereas logic would make the continued existence of such a practice unlikely and analysis of ATT's cost and revenue structure would indicate that it probably has the opposite effect on their bottom line. ATT's homepage for DSL customers i…
I don't quite follow you. You seem to be saying that AT&T is smart enough not to do things that aren't cost effective, so there must be a reason for this. I think that's overly generous. Aaron Patterson spoke at RailsConf. He said he works for AT&T, and to submit an expense report, he scans paper receipts to a PDF, emails that somewhere, which converts the PDF to a fax, which faxes it somewhere else to be converted b…
The experience of an employee such as Aaron Patterson is pretty much irrelevant to the bottom line given more than two orders of magnitude difference between the number of employees and customers (~260,000 employess vs ~100 million wireless customers without counting landline, internet, and TV customers). [http://www.att.com/gen/investor-relations?pid=19251]
The fact that they are leveraging legacy business processes rather than reengineering them for the sake of aesthetics (keep in mind thtat even with reengineering Aaron would still be scanning his receipt and the person in accounting would still be dealing with a PDF and it doesn't cost them anything to use idle bandwidth because they own the pipe).
Don't misunderstand me, ATT doesn't get any of my money because of my past dissatisfaction with them. My point is that it is a mistake to misinterpret their webpage in the way the article does.
[edit] In fact the process of converting PDF's into faxes and back into PDF's makes a lot of sense from a document management standing because it will convert Aarons 2400 dpi 32bit scan of a Chili's receipt to the 100 dpi 1 bit image which is sufficient to do the job. Thereby reducing long term storage costs, standardizing the stored format, and almost certainly integrating with the initial portions of the office automation system which no doubt were designed to convert faxes from the field into digital documents for use by accounting staff.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#46Of course, a lot of this is plain incompetence, but there is a security motive explaining why enterprises only support specific browser versions, even if it's an irrational one. Enterprises fear people will blame them even when the browser is at fault. Celebrity's AT&T account gets hacked? "ZOMG AT&T doesn't care about its users' data."
It's not entirely crazy either, when you consider how mainstream media and consumers perceive security incidents. The problem, though, is when enterprises tend to be overly conservative, not acknowledging "reasonable risk". And being out of touch with browser trends, ie assuming that only a particular version of IE is safe. (In this case, IE is probably required because the developers didn't know any better, but in other cases, an out-of-date understanding of browsers is the rationale for supporting only IE.)
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be a good rule for calling any cable/phone ISP. The last time I mentioned using a Mac the support person ignored that I had already tried pinging certain gateways to check connectivity, and proceeded to condescendingly walk me through going to Applications->Utilities->Network Utility so that I could run ping from a tab there. Of course I quit after 15 min of this, tried to access again in a couple hours…
I had to setup AT&T DSL last week. The modem itself didn't have a connection (blinking DSL LED, no Internet LED), and I made the mistake of mentioning to the tech that I was using an Apple router instead of the Cisco router they sent me. He stopped investigating the problem right there and the only thing he would do for me was transfer me to Cisco support for the router even though I expressly stated that there was n…
Could be worse. AT&T let my mother-in-law sign up for service. She gets the modem, we set it up, blinking DSL light for days.
We call, after two hours on the phone they agree to send a tech out. Tech takes one look at the pole and says "you're too far from the office. They never should have let you sign up"
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#48I work for AT&T. I have an obligation to inform you that what I say doesn't represent their official blahblah whatever. You should know this isn't an on-message marketing communique. AT&T, the company that created Unix and C, could be said to no longer exist, or more correctly could be said to be a different company than the one now called by that name. A little (abridged, simplified) history: AT&T, you may remember,…
Some history from Colbert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCp-1hgfxI
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#49> "In short: a simple web-form system shouldn’t end up installing Internet Explorer 8 for you. I think it’s interesting particularly because no lean startup would ever ever do this in a million years, yet we aren’t particularly surprised when a big company is flushing dollars down the toilet in this way." I would hardly be surprised if doing it this way saves ATT millions of dollars. The default browser for Windows X…
Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?
Remember it is easy to detect IE6 using on the client-side using JS and on the server-side using user-agent detection. Then if the ActiveX is really needed, you can do that using JavaScript too.
Re: AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form
#50I just signed up for AT&T and their whole signup process is incredibly broken. Their customer section is divided into three sections: Wireless; Internet and Phone; and U-verse. Each has it's own login system. One use sequential IDs for logins, one usernames and the other email addresses.
I spent ages fighting the login and ID recovery system before I found out my DSL connection came under "U-verse" and not "Internet". Their login page even has a helpful picture of a TV to illustrate the U-verse link: http://www.att.com/accounts/?source=IC4425j4900s2000
I still have no idea what "U-verse" is and what differentiates it. I just assume that some crappy marketing manager thought the name was cute.