AT&T is the bane of my existence

Now just from the title of my post one might think I am another I phone user whose call keeps getting dropped. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't have an I phone. Hell, I don't even use AT&T for my cell carrier.

No, what AT&T does to piss me off happened in the past, some of it very long in the past. What do the companies NCR, Teradata, Alcatel-Lucent, Qwest, Comcast, and Verizon have in common? All came either wholly or partly from a spin off of AT&T. Back in 1984, AT&T was forced to divest itself of it's local phone subsidiaries causing it to spin off 7 Baby Bells like Southwestern Bell, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, etc. Later on they spun off Lucent, NCR, and their ownership stake in Comcast as they only owned part of Comcast. In an ironic twist, number of the Baby Bells have merged back into AT&T in one form or another since 2005. In fact one of the Baby Bells, SBC Communications, (originally Southwestern Bell) actually bought out AT&T but kept the AT&T name for the company. So a portion of AT&T that was spun off from the main company, bought out the main company about 20 years later.

What this means for me is about once or twice a month someone sends in paperwork from a client who has held AT&T forever and still holds shares of AT&T but has no idea of the original cost of the shares. And I have to figure out which shares of AT&T came from the original company or came from shares that spun off from AT&T and merged back into the main company. Tomorrow that is what I'll be spending a lot of time on. Don't get me wrong, I like this kind of research, it appeals to my meticulous side and I'm pretty good at it and have a lot of experience in dealing with AT&T and all of the corporate actions surrounding it. But it is a major pain to take a pile of paperwork and turn it into a legible and accurate cost basis for the client. But enough of boring you all to tears.

On a side note, I want to let you know I start my total with a 3 now. I was running really bad for so long I thought I might never get my balance up in my poker account. I was down to $40 or so in my account before I finally started putting some cashes together. Had a nice score to get me over $150 and have since been slowly building my pot up until I broke 3 last night. Whew, it was a tough go but I'm fairly satisfied and have played decently lately. Hopefully I get it over 4 and 5 and not down to 2 or 1 or worse. Anyway, it's about time for bed. As the wife always tells the kids before they leave the house, Make Good Choices.