We needed to add a couple existing phones to my account and bundle them as a family plan, and it should have been a very easy thing to do but took quite a while.

Apparently when my account was setup, it was on a particular “network” in the AT&T accounting system, and the other phones were in a newer different “network”. In this case, network has nothing to do with the physical wireless network, it is like a sales/marketing territory or something. They are trying to convert everyone to the newer network, and so they couldn’t move my older account into the newer network without giving me a new account number.

The devil is in the details though, so I asked about the corporate discount I get through my work, and if that would still apply to my new account. It wouldn’t, and it would take up to three months for it to apply again. I also asked about my automatic scheduled payments, and if I would need to set those up again from scratch. Of course I would.

Anyways, I fought and should receive a credit so that my corporate discount doesn’t have any lapse. The phone assistant was nice enough an helped us through fixing that once we complained about it.

What a pain to have to go through, just so AT&T can clean up its internal accounting workings.