Writing a complaint letter

Hello, I have been a Cingular/AT&T customer for a few years now. I never had a cell phone service plan until I joined the Marine Corps about 4 1/2 years ago, and I had started out with Verizon. After a deployment and unwarranted charges to my account while my military suspension from the companies services was active, I decided to make the switch to Cingular. After another deployment, and another instance of "lost Military Deployment Orders" at the hands of the Carlsbad, CA branch of ATT, I'm yet again considering a service change.

Let me start this back in early July of 2008. I had just come back from my second deployment, serving both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and participating in multiple humanitarian missions, so it felt extremely good to be home. I call up the fine workers at ATT to reconnect my service, and I had some $700+ charges to my phone bill. How could this be? Before the deployment, I handed them a copy of my signed orders, in person, to the reps

at the store. I was told that my account would be active when I returned home. I was told that I would just have to walk into the store to show them I was back, and I would have my cell phone account activated right then and there. This didn't happen. Apparently what had happened was that this store had lost my orders, or had forgot to put them into the computer. Either way, I couldn't get a straight answer, but what I did know was that my (760) number that I had when I left, was now in the hands of another ATT customer. My account was terminated, because ATT Reps lost the orders that I hand-delivered.

It took nearly a week of driving to this mall back and forth, 30 minutes each way from Camp Pendleton, just to be able to use the service that I had paid for. After this week, I was extremely dissatisfied with the results. The charges from this account were dropped, however, I was told that if I wanted to continue being a customer of ATT, that I would have to pay the $150 activation fee. Is this how one of the most popular phone companies in the United States is supposed to conduct business with military personnel? I was outraged. We went back and forth for about 45 minutes, and in the end I just gave in. I needed to contact my family to set up travel arrangements, because, you know, I hadn't seen them for the past 9 months. So, reluctantly, I gave them the $150, along with the extra money that came with buying a Blackberry Curve.

My service from then on was fairly well, until about a month after I bought the Blackberry. I started noticing a build-up of something around where the charging cord plugs into on the phone. It was a blue/gray color. It also wouldn't charge all of the time. The phone had not even been near any water or liquid, so I knew it wasn't liquid damage. I brought the phone into the same store that I had previous issues with, and they told me there was nothing I could do about because it was 3 days past the 30-day period in which I could have exchanged the phone for no extra charge. This bothered me because I had insisted that the phone had not been near any liquid, yet the employees just accused me of lying, saying that it had to have been dipped in water. This was interesting I thought, because my friend Chris had also bought the same Blackberry Curve as me, and he did drop his in a sink full of water on accident. The only issue that resulted from this was that the trackball wasn't as sensitive as it use to be. It was completely submerged in water, yet no corrosion built up. Is his phone immune to that type of "water damage" that I was accused of doing, or was my phone just defective somehow? Either way, all I was asking for at this point was a replacement phone. No other problems came up with the phone, just the minor problem of it not being able to charge all of the time. Adding to the problem was that the Customer Service lady I was talking to could barely speak English. I understand that Spanish is a common language in Southern California, but she couldn't even understand half of the things I was saying to her. Frustrated, I just ended up leaving (which is what it seems like is a common trait with all ATT employees.....argue until the customer gives up). A few weeks went by, and the phone just stopped charging completely. I went to unplug it because the prongs weren't connecting at all, and half of them just fell off!

The next morning I went back to the same store. I complained to the same lady as stated earlier, and finally got around talking to a manager. I was extremely upset at this point, and ended up arguing for nearly an hour. I showed them my friend's phone that had been soaked in water. The manager just said that there was no way to prove it wasn't water damage, so the warranty OR insurance wouldn't cover this. All I was asking for was a replacement phone. Not an upgrade, just another Blackberry Curve. I'm paying $5 a month for an insurance premium, that does what exactly? The attitude I was getting from the manager was also upsetting, I'd never had to deal with someone so unprofessional. I told him that I would be filing a complaint with the headquarters of ATT and the Better Business Bereau, and local/military publications, and he just brushed me off and told me "Go ahead". I wrote down his name and left.

As of right now, I spent $450 restarting my service that was wrongly terminated ($150 activation fee, $300 for the Blackberry Curve phone/plan), along with nearly $180 a month because of all the features I had included with this phone. This totals to about $1170 spent in 4 months. It's pretty amazing that a customer can spend over $1000 in 4 months, and I can't even get a replacement phone because I missed the cutoff date by 3 days.

At this point, I'm not even asking for another Blackberry phone. I'd like to be compensated for the activation fee that I should not have been forced to pay for in the first place, a phone of my choice valued up to the $300 that I paid for the Blackberry Curve at no charge, a 6-month free credit report mailed to my address so I can attempt to finally raise my credit score that was brought down for the 8 months I was deployed, and $50 credited to my ATT account in return for the ridiculous amount of driving I had to do just to be able to talk on my phone.