So I have AT&T wireless for my cellphone service and as of now my contract is up with them.

It should be as easy as just re-upping right? Well for me it’s not, while I’m happy with the service I don’t like how they do business overall and especially their customer service practices.

Most likely I’ll stay with them as I can get a phone call in my house so that makes me happy. I’ve tried Sprint and Cricket and about 75% of my calls were missed using their services.

Now I signed up with AT&T originally over three years ago, it’ll be four coming up, but in the middle there they switched to Cingular as everyone knows and now they switched back to ATT. The point is that I signed up for a 2yr contract originally with ATT, but the changeover to Cingular made things weird and I was told that I would have to switch over full time to Cingular, so of course I did and they told me that I would be out of my contract with ATT and start a new one with Cingular. So that’s fine I guess, I like the idea of rollover a lot, as of now I have a little over 2,000 minutes in my rollover, but what bugs me is that according to ATT I didn’t exist, or I didn’t have an account with them until this past two year contract. What happened to the time I was with ATT before the merger? I don’t understand that at all, it’s as if I didn’t exist to them, I only had about 4 months left on my original contract but switched because they told me that I had to, so where did the 20 months go?

The main reason I question all of this is because about 5 months ago my phone started acting up and I remembered that if you’re with ATT for a period of time you are eligible for a new phone, so I figured hey I should be fine right? Wrong apparently, because of this little thing were I didn’t exist, and they have no records of me being an ATT/Cingular customer before this current 2yr contract. So I was screwed there, no matter what I did, no matter what proof I had, original contracts etc, they said I wasn’t in their system so I wasn’t their customer… dunno.

Anyway, I have three phones, one is a smartphone that I rarely use anymore because it keeps locking up, and two others that are exactly the same, just basic cheapie flip phones that I don’t care if anything happens to. The point being is that those were my phones, and not something I got from ATT, I brought my own unlocked phones with me, so really shouldn’t I be entitled to a phone to begin with since I never got one from them?

The next gripe would have to be that  I was never told my contract was up now with ATT, I had to ask them when it was up and they said ‘now’. They text me, email me, snail-mail me all kinds of stupid offers and junk but yet they can’t notify me of something important like my contract being up with them? Why?

I don’t know.. actually I totally lost my train of thought towards the end there, my friend called me needing help with his computer and he’s one of those people that literally is lucky he can even find the power button, he’s just amazingly frustrating to try and explain things to. He doesn’t know what I mean when I ask him if he can see his desktop? I have to explain to him that it’s the screen where all the icons are… it’s just like WOW! I just want to scream right now from talking to him. He was here not more than two hours ago and I walked him through step by step on my computer and even wrote down instructions for him, which he didn’t follow and totally forgot what I showed him to do… sigh

Most people think that it’s great to be self-employed and working for yourself, but it isn’t all that great really…

Sure, for the most part I don’t answer to anyone really (my wife maybe..) but there are deadlines to meet from jobs that you acquire and commit to. So yeah you do answer to the people who contract out your services, and essentially they are your boss, after all they’re the ones paying your bills.

One thing I’ve learned about working for myself is that time is really at a minimum, people, especially your family think that since you’re self-employed, work from home, that you have all this free-time, that’s the farthest from the truth there could be in reality.

I’ll get phones calls from my family asking me what I’m doing, and if I’m home, they assume that since I’m home I can drop everything I’m doing and run to fulfill their needs no matter how petty or small they may be, it’s amazing the demands that people can come up with when they think that since you are not at a ‘real’ job you really aren’t working…

Prime example would be when my mom was in the hospital for a week right after Christmas, my Aunt (mom’s sister) felt that I had become her slave for whatever reason and that whatever she wanted was more important than what I was doing. She called me up one day and demanded that I come down to my moms and take down her Christmas tree, and the amazing part was that she actually demanded it, it had to be done right then, right now, I had to stop everything and go do this for her. It couldn’t wait until the next day, and she just could not grasp the fact that when she called I was on my way to pick up my children from school and the fact that my wife had class that night so there was no way I could come down in the evening either and do it.

It seems to me that most people out there don’t view being self-employed as a real job, they think that if you spend most of your time home that you’re not really working at all.

I do quite a bit of things, I make barely any money from my websites, not even enough to pay my hosting and internet expenses every month, so of course I have to supplement my income. Obviously having knowledge about computers is helpful in getting work, and does provide a bit of income.

I do other work as well like I help a friend out who has quite a few upscale apartments in the Pittsburgh area, and a few are rented out to college kids, so sometimes they need a bit of repair work, painting etc. I also find it amazing that even adults can leave a place in a mess, it’s amazing how some people really don’t seem to care about things like that.

So I’m not always home, it depends on what I’m doing at the time, sure I might be home working on my website, but I also might be home remotely accessing one of the security computers that I installed and performing maintenance on it. Yeah I do that as well, PC based security systems, and trust me it’s not as fun as it sounds, sure the computer part is but running wires etc through dirty attics and climbing up on the roof isn’t my idea of fun when it’s 90 degrees outside.

Oh well, I just think that people need to understand that just because someone you know is self-employed and/or works from home they don’t have always have all this free time that you think they do.