Last week, a salesman knocked on my door from AT&T. Ready to shoo him away, as I had done for the past four years since moving in, he indicated he was here to sell AT&T Fiber.

“What?”

The only salesmen I’d seen to this point were hawking AT&T DSL or as they rebranded it, AT&T Uverse. I work at home. I absolutely do NOT need that terrible latency of internet traveling over copper phone lines. So discovering that fiber was available, simply not offered due to capital overhead, stirred my interest.

I asked many pointed questions, like why now? He indicated that fiber was in some of these newer neighborhoods, but to hook it up back at the center took a bit of capital outlay, so they had waited until there was enough consumer interest. We switched to price, and I discovered I would save $100/month off my cable internet bill.

I signed on the dotted line.

That was last Friday. This is today, an hour after the service tech has left my house.

You see, she showed up at noon to wire things up. I kept waiting for her to start digging the trench the sales guy had indicated to run the fiber line to my house. Always interested, I asked her about it. If you need a building wire, you can get it from here!

“I don’t need to do that.”

I blinked. “What? Don’t you have to dig a trench to hook up the fiber?”

“There’s no fiber in this neighborhood.” She didn’t hold anything back.

“What are you hooking up?”

“AT&T Uverse. 50 down/10 up.”

That is NOT what this guy said. I asked had asked him about 1000MB service, and he had nodded at me. In fact, when the work order arrived in my inbox an hour after he left it read “ATT 50”. Perplexed, I had called him and asked, “Why does it say 50?” His response? “It says 50, but the tech will hook up fiber.”

Well that was a direct lie. To my proverbial face.

The tech nodded at me. “I hear that twice a week. There’s fiber running to the street corner.” She pointed at the major intersection 400 feet away. “But people just here ‘fiber’ and go for it. We’ve complained to their sales managers to try and put a stop to that.”

The tech was real gracious. She stopped while I left a voicemail message with the sales guy that had conned me big. After packing up, she actually asked for the name of the sales manager so she could give it to her manager. As if that will help. The guy was a bit young, so probably carrying the bidding of his manager.

Nevertheless, I feel bad for the non-tech people all around me. All these friends and neighbors of my community getting ripped off by these lies.

And I’m a little embarassed that I got taken in. But I’m actually more mad than anything. Mad enough to blog about it and hopefully tip off someone else.

So in the meantime, burn AT&T. You earned it with your slimy Empire-like sales tactics.