OK, hold up for a second here. Just this morning I was watching television trying to catch the news before I went in to work and I happened to catch a commercial that said something along the lines of "cingular is now the new AT & T." Pardon me if that strikes me a little bit odd, since I've been a paying subscriber to Cingular's cellular phone service for the last six or seven years or so. I didn't hear anything about this change, especially if and how it's going to affect me as a paying customer. I put it out of my mind until this afternoon when I decided to visit cingular dot com and find out what the story is all about. In all honesty, I wasn't all that surprised to hear about yet another cellular merger going on, but it's usually a lot of small companies just buying up other small companies. And if it is a bigger company, I recall that it's usually been cingular who is buying someone else up. Well, I'll tell you that after visiting the Cingular website, I'm still not all too sure exactly what has happened. I did learn a few interesting tidbits about the company that I pay eighty dollars to every month for my phone service though. So Cingular really isn't a company at all...surprise surprise...I had now idea about that. Apparently, Cingular is just a brand name that happens to have formerly been owned by both AT & T and BellSouth. Somewhere along the way, AT & T acquired BellSouth, and therefore the idea is that Cingular is now solely owned by AT & T because BellSouth no longer exists. So which is it? Is AT & T Cingular, or is Cingular now AT & T. Who is my cellular provider?...Cingular or AT & T? Do I still make out my monthly payments to Cingular?...or do I make them out to AT & T. See the thing is, I would have thought that I would have received some friendly email or mass mailing in my mailbox about the whole change. Maybe since they haven't made a customer-related effort to tell anyone about it, maybe that means that nothing on the customer side of things is changing. I'm hoping there aren't going to be any plans changes, coverage changes, rate changes, etc. I mean they already make people pay practically an arm and a leg every single month for phone service. The information about the merger and the new AT & T business is really cryptically described on the website, which honestly makes me a little nervous. I like to know what all is going on with a company if I'm sending them monthly payments. Is that so unreasonable? When you look up information about the merger on the Cingular website, where I go to do my online phone bill transactions each month, the link that they provide for "more information" is a link to the AT & T website. At that website, another short cryptic paragraph about the "benefits of the merger" is all that is provided, along with....you guessed it...more links, right back to the individual Cingular and BellSouth websites. I don't know what you think, but my opinion is that someone needs to pay their web developers more...or someone is getting the wool pulled over their eyes. Maybe the case is that they don't exactly even know corporately what has happened or will happen, so they are keeping it pretty hush hush so that customers don't expect anything right off the bat. All the sites keep promising is that the merger will benefit customers by providing a larger network with better coverage. Hey, I'm all for that, but I'd just like to know the hows and whys of what is going to happen...next week, next month,...I'd even settle for next year.

And seriously, what other cellular phone companies are even out there anymore? Does Sprint still exist? I remember that not too long ago they were having big time problems. Hmm...I'm trying to think about what cellular phone companies are represent in those annoying commericals with "Chad" the Verizon guy. Hmm..Catherine Zeta Jones isn't on television any longer promoting whoever she was promoting formerly...was that Sprint?