Years ago I had a cell phone with AT&T that I was not very happy with. It gave me only one bar of service at my house, and commonly, on the way to a job, would drop calls for no particular reason that I could figure. This was within the city limits of Austin, and I found it extremely annoying.

I was reading an article on cell phones, finding that cell towers covered about a 6 mile radius around a tower, and realized that obviously the dead spots and the poor signal strength at my house were caused by not having enough towers for good coverage. Meaning not enough money invested in infrastructure by AT&T, just another whore corporation, more interested in paying their investors than in providing a robust service for those of us having to use the infernal devices.

At the time, only two companies were building towers, AT&T and Sprint, and each company used a different type of protocol, which were incompatible with each other. So if you were connected to the other guy’s tower, you were relegated to analog service, much weaker and more dysfunctional than the digital service that you would get if you were connected to your own network. AT&T and T-Mobile  used AT&T towers, and Sprint and Verizon used Sprint towers.

My frustration grew with AT&T, so much so that I went to their nearby store and tried to talk to somebody about it. They swore they could give me better service if I would just upgrade to a, of course, more expensive plan. Which was total BS, because a more expensive plan was still depending on their weak infrastructure of not enough towers.  And AT&T had a habit of randomly tacking on pointless charges to my bill, as well, and I was tired of that. 

So in a hissy fit over more of their awful service, I drove to the Verizon store and switched over to them, which actually saved me about $20 per month in charges. 

I wanted to make a point with AT&T, so the next day I took off from the jobsite about noonish, and drove to the AT&T store. I pulled the chip out of my old AT&T phone, grabbed my hammer, and sallied forth into the noon crowd inside. There must have been 50 people inside, and I walked to a clear space on the floor, and said in a really loud voice, “Hey everybody! Look what I think of AT&T and their crappy service!” Whereupon I dropped my old AT&T phone on the floor, and rared back and smashed the crap out of it with my hammer. Pieces went flying everywhere, and it became totally silent in the store. It felt soooo good to bash the thing.

“I just came from the Verizon store, and saved myself 20 bucks a month, for better service!” I again said very loudly, as I had everybody’s attention. “You should give up on this fly-by-night company, and go see the good folks at Verizon, and stop getting ripped off for sub par service!” And I walked out of the store, where probably half the people were dialing 911.

As I drove my truck north on Brodie lane, chuckling, in my rearview mirror I could see cop cars coming from every direction, speeding into the AT&T parking lot. Hey, It wasn’t unlawful to be dissatisfied and smash up your old phone.

Sometimes it’s necessary to speak up for yourself. 

I have been with Verizon ever since, and have no complaints. My phone has worked wherever I was in the United States, and even worked great on the Island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, and in Rio Bravo Mexico where it could tie into the network on the US side of the border from the roof of my hotel.

Rage against the machine. <3