AT&T Rant

[maliciant 7]

My company has an AT&T Yellowpages and advertising website, we apparently use them because it gives us some kind of discount on our yellow pages listing which is important to our business, and not based on any other particular merrits (our website does look nice and all though and most likely their design team created it, it's basic and anything someone might view as amatuerish probably came at the bosses specific request... he likes his fonts large and easy to read... and you probably will too when you reach his age).

But on to the important part, I started working on a new project at work and for that project we decided php was the way to go, for those that don't know what php is, it's a scripting langauge that allows a website to do cool things, like run a forum (specifically these forums are php forums), it's a free to use langauge and is provided by almost every single webhosting service out there, if you are paying anything at all for webhosting you probably have the ability to use php scripting... but I figured since AT&T uses a template builder thing (which is overall pretty nice once you get used to it) I'd better ask them if anything special has to be done or if it's supported...

Their answers were along the lines of what is it? I've never heard of that? etc... This is pretty strange for anyone working in any way with website hosting to have no knowledge about it at all, to the point of saying they'd never heard of it before... that's like someone working in wallstreet not knowing that stock tickers exist or a dock worker not knowing what a shark is (ok, maybe that's a bit unfair, I think most everyone in the world regardless of career knows what a shark is). The first guy who said he didn't know php was a billing department guy, so while it's a little surprising it's understandable, but when he transfered me to their website people (the phone number on their webpage was outdated and so I think I got redirected to the wrong lace) and I got a similar response it was kind of jaw dropping. When I explained what php was/what we were going to use it for, the lady on the phone told me AT&T has security and stuff to prevent us from grabbing other customers personal information and yadda yadda yadda... she seemed to be under the impression that I was wanting to run something on their servers to grab their customers information, what I actually said I wanted to do was create an online job application for our business, she got really pissed when I told her uh, she was completely misunderstanding what I had said, she told me "well, that's your opinion". At that point I went from being a little frustrated that so called web people had no idea what I was talking about (but still perfectly calm) to... realizing I could probably boil coffee through rage alone... that's when I told her "Thanks for the help, bye." and hung up, I remained professional (at least relatively, I'm not opposed to a good ####### joke or a bad male chauvinist joke at work for example...) until after I hung up the phone and said a few choice words... and then posted my rant here (the only forum that I do more than lurk at).

I wish I had thought to ask for her name, I mean I wouldn't go so far as to send any kind of formal complaint but at the point where she actually got me mad it would have been worth it to ask for the kind of information I'd need to report her... followed by messing with her in some fashion, perhaps by asking her every question listed on their website faq... while I try to think of something that would annoy her even more... like... after finishing that list, repeating a lot of the questions... or asking another question in a variety of ways... and when all else fails I guess I could just go for "You do it"...

I'm still a little shocked that AT&T doesn't know what PHP is... I almost want to call them up and ask about PHP again, what chance is there I'd find another website support person who doesn't know what PHP is...

[Dave and Helena 0]

If the website people can't even update the phone number to their own department on their website I bet you will find more people there not knowing what PHP is. PHP which, btw, is the best programming language ever. LOVE it.

[scandal 951]

AT&T is a very large organization with lots of different business lines.

Not sure which particular group you're talking to about your hosting plan.

Here's one link to a hosting package that clearly does have PHP support:

http://www.att.com/gen/webhosting?pid=10361

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[BluesTraveler 0]

Don't really know what you are trying to do on your website and the amount of traffic you get,

but if you want a great VPS from a reliable company I would highly suggest rackspace. They will give you a VPS with root access, so basically you can do what the ever hell you want.

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

Choose the cloud servers, option. It is about $12.00 a month unless you have tonnes of traffic to your site.