Sinuous cell phone service
Our cell phone service is with Cingular. No endorsement implied. In my experience they all provide equally mediocre service. Cingular just happened to work for us when we got these phones. And really, we never signed up for Cingular, anyway. We signed up for AT&T Wireless. But then Cingular bought out the cell phone division of AT&T. So we have had to deal with Cingular. But now SBC, which owns Cingular -- or some major portion thereof, has bought out the rest of AT&T and the SBC label is going to disappear for awhile -- replaced by AT&T.

Are we confused yet? There is more.

Now that SBC is going to be AT&T the marketing experts think it would be good if their cell phone operation was brought in line with the rest of the company. So lo and behold they are going to replace the Cingular label with the name AT&T.

This means that my cell phone, which says "AT&T Wireless" on it, is once again in sync with the realities of the marketplace -- except the new AT&T logo is all lowercase -- "at&t".

Of course, all of the neighborhood Cingular stores (which used to be AT&T stores) will now have to become at&t stores. New banners and new signs are certainly on the way!

There is no doubt in my befuddled mind that the Justice Department was in cahoots with the sign companies when they broke up the AT&T monopoly ("Ma Bell") in the decade between 1974 and 1984. The signmakers are the ones making the most money on all of these sell-offs and mergers.

The consumers are just confused.

Oh, and I suppose they're also hopeful that their new-old cell company will be able to provide them with more bars, fewer drops, and lower prices. I doubt it will help, though. The last name change didn't.