AT&T fesses up to iPhone billing mistakes

Remember eight hours ago when I went on a little rant about how evil AT&T is, and how their foolish 50-page-long iPhone bills were bound to kill tens of thousands of trees? Well, Muhammad Saleem, who did the original calculations of the wasted paper's arboreal impacts, received a note from an AT&T employee discussing the ways in which AT&T is attempting to mend their mistake.

Now this isn't a high-up employee or anything, but they work at a call center, and so they know when policy changes take place. According to the employee AT&T is switching to a "summary billing" system, where the bills are a normal one or two pages, but extra details are available online. New users will have to pay an extra two dollars to receive the full novella-length bill in their mail box.

Employees of the call center are asked to push paperless billing. However, this still isn't the default state, nor is it cheaper than receiving hard-copy bills. I don't understand this. Just make it default paperless already!

I guess we'll have to wait a few more years for that...though the time sure seems right to me. Anyhow, the anonymous employee finishes the email to Muhammad by saying that AT&T either "just wants to make an extra buck, or really does care about trees and is just trying to sway customers away from viewing their bill on paper, I like to think that they are doing the latter. Though, it’'s probably the former. ATT doesn't have the greatest scruples in the world."

Sounds about right to me.

Via Muhammad Saleem