Emailing Steve Jobs? Cool. Emailing AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson? Dangerous.

Wed, Jun 2, 2010

Legal, News

If you email Apple CEO Steve Jobs, there’s a decent chance you might actually get a response from the big kahuna and subsequently find your name and accompanying email featured on every Apple and tech blog on the web.

Now if you email AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, on the other hand, you might run the risk of getting yourself a fancy schmancy cease and desist letter from AT&T’s legal department.

Here’s what went down.

In light of AT&T’s recently revamped data plans, AT&T user Giorgio Galante emailed Randall Stephenson to express his strong disappointment with the changes.

Thanks for making the switch to a Sprint HTC Evo an even easier decision.  I don’t think even Steve Jobs can spin 2GB for $25/month as a good thing for the consumer.  I may not use  2GB/month today, but the point of these devices (iPad 3g, iPhone 4G, etc.) is that we’ll be able to do more and your network either can’t handle it, or you’re just trying to squeeze more money out of your customers.  The $15/month 200MB plan is just a crappy anchor price that makes the $25 plan look like a better deal than it really is, given that the $30/”unlimited” plan goes away.

Please don’t have one of your $12/hour “Executive Relations” college students call me – I’ve found them to be generally poorly informed (Engadget.com readers know more than they do about AT&T) and they have little  authority to do anything sensible.

This is simply a soon-to-be former customer feedback.

Regards,

Giorgio G.

A member of AT&T’s executive response team soon called Giorgio back and kindly warned him that if he continues to email Stephenson, a cease and desist letter maybe be sent to his address. Given that the AT&T rep on the phone referred to Giorgio’s email as the “latest email”, something tells us that Giorgio was emailing Stephenson a lot. Update: Turns out that Giorgio only emailed AT&T once before, which begs the question – what the hell is up with AT&T’s disproportionate response?

You can listen to a truncated version of AT&T’s phone message below.

via attepicfail

  Share

,

2 Comments For This Post

  1. AndrewK Says:

    Something tells me there’s more to this story than currently meets the eye.

  2. Jared Says:

    Like I needed any more excuses to loath AT&T more. Reality check, people: this is email— you can write a filter to blacklist email addresses and it won’t cost you $5-$10 a month like it would to get AT&T to block harassing phone calls. Dante should have created a special circle of hell for telecom executives.

eXTReMe Tracker