Binaryfaith

Email to SMS.. Pretty basic one would think.. At&t simply doesn’t get it..

Nor do they get basic concepts like customer service, troubleshooting, provisioning or systems management. Here is a case in point.

It appears that the pager that my company has been using maxes out at 500 messages a month. I’ve managed to severely get the company overcharged due to some system alerts. .. So I was asked to have my cell be used as a pager ($20 unlimited is way better.) This person said that he has had no problems sending email to his phone number @ txt.att.net.. When I tried it, I got a bounce.

So I called at&t and spoke to a standard rep. She had me reset my phone no less than 4 times before she was willing to escalate me to a higher support person. Once with that person, she had me reset my phone again. After I did that, we tried more attempts before she told me to go to the at&t store to exchange my SIM card.

While at the store, I replaced the SIM and tried the email again.. It failed (as expected)
At that point, the associate said “try # @ mycingular.net”, which worked! He said that he had done that years ago and happened to think of it.

Now, fast forward a couple of hours. I sent my phone the test, and it worked, but then I replied to the text and the “from” address was the txt.att.net! This means that should I respond through SMS, the recipient can’t respond back to me through that message… It gets bounced.

After figuring this out, I called AT&T after hours support and they basically told me that I’m attempting to use old tech and that they don’t know anything about it and they can’t support it. Looks like I get to make a phone call tomorrow. Oh the joy.

Sometimes in our community, it’s important to point out when people do the wrong thing. In the case of Sys Admins, who regularly get blasted by end users for not respecting them, sometimes we actually do the wrong thing. In this case, the Sys Admin who has been doing this for years should really know better. The behavior is called being a “Cowboy.” This is where a sysadmin makes a change to a system w/o letting other sysadmins know, or letting the users know that the change is being made. It’s really our responsibility to do the right thing and 1) ask first and 2) notify of the change in question.

(continue reading…)

Bought a Vantec UGT-ST450-CB eSATA Expresscard/32 card a couple of months ago. Had it running perfectly in Tiger. When I upgraded to Leopard, it worked just fine until I re-installed (fresh) for a completely different reason. I realized that I had not had the latest driver. I contacted Vantec and asked for a new driver. (You can’t download MacOSX drivers from their site. Only Windows. heh…

The tech essentially told me that the card wasn’t supported, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nice job! (I do tech support for my company and know better than to tell customers that in the way that he did it.) After a bit of shock and dismay, I asked him for the chipset manufacturer. He told me it was Silicon Image.. Well 30 seconds of googling led me to their site and found the driver.

All is well.

Once again, tech support at crappy companies makes us look good.