Double Standard for AT&T versus consumer meeting arranged payments: I paid; service not restored

0404.2018.1243AM.Wednesday

For very complex and involved reasons I won't go into I returned home thinking the bank was paying my creditors as arranged, even tested them, only to find fees, penalties, overdraft charges had been misapplied drawing down the balance of my reserve bank account so that last month I could not pay the entire AT&T bill which had NOT been paid for what looks like three months.  This afternoon I paid ten dollars more than the agreed upon partial payment a day ahead of when I thought I would have the funds.  

No automated system or human being is able to tell me my service was restored later today -- because it wasn't.  And while acknowledging my payment made earlier today, from the system, a day earlier than arranged last week, both the humans and the automated systems simply picked up the remaining balance due, demanding  the remaining balance must be paid before service will be restored. Now the half of the remaining balance and the full balance due next month were to be paid next month, and the same the following month, that is in May and June 2018; then in July 2018 I would be caught up and only paying the current balance.  The AT&T employees and automated systems did not have access to these details.  Why make a payment arrangement on the phone with only the person you spoke to knows about it: doesn't it make more sense for the billing and service areas of the company have to be updated 

1 that a partial payment, catching up, is in effect

2.  that service was to be restored if I made the first partial payment, which I did.

That's the double standard: I kept my part, but AT&T is unable, more likely unable to keep their part as they are so big and communication is so poor half of the computers in the company can't even talk to the computers in the other half of the company.  I could not believe it when I was told this when I learned the payment for my internet and cable television was mistakenly applied to my landline account and vice versa.  It took four months during which I observed obscene violations of the basic laws of bookkeepping and accounting as these people tried to have the landline computers and the wireless-cableTV-Internet computers talk to each other.  Unsuccessfully with each and every failed attempt increasing the magnitude of the error in the balances in landline and "the other side" whatever the formal name for the rest of the activities which are not dealing with landlines to home and businesses.  

What suggestions or observations about holding AT&T to their part of a verbal contract about a payment arrangement.

Do you agree the company is almost literally to big to inform all the people timely who shouold have information and receive updates to that information?  Practically speaking that is my experience.  On the other hand part of me wants to say, once a payment arrangement is made, then once a payment is made, it should only be the matter of a keystroke for the rest of AT&T to be informed of the payment agreement, last week, and then today to be updated - there was no waiting as I paid cash so it didn't have to be posted and clear --unless someone automatically put a hold on a cash payment -- wouldn't that be embarassing if it was true - especially for that person's supervisor or trainer?