Secret AT&T phone resetting?

So yesterday, the wife comes home and says she’s done. The phone lies to her too much. She was in an accident the other day, had 3-4 bars, and every time tried making a call, got a “no service available” response. This happens all the time. Between it cutting out all the time, dropped calls, and most damning, the lying by saying it has service when it doesn’t, she’s had it. Everyone else gets service on their cell phones in certain areas – why can’t she or I with our AT&T phones?

So I call AT&T and say this isn’t going to work. The wife has had it, is going to throw her phone in the river and is going to drop AT&T – damn the costs. I need help.

So they're trying to help - sort of. First we got the lame power cycle reply. That’s crap, I’m not going to power cycle my phone every time I want to make a call. And while driving, it still isn’t going to jump towers anyway.

Plan B – they supposedly sent a “boost” signal to her phone, and mine, upon my request. Aha, this is more like it, sounds like the phone needs some setting adjustments to be more aggressive about jumping towers. But to activate that, we have to dial #002. Okay, so we dial #002 – and get a message saying can’t complete call as dialed. Wtf is that? Aren’t we supposed to get some kind of “boost activated!” message or something? I don’t think this worked. So the battle continues. The frustrating part is there’s really no immediate feedback diagnostics. The problem is the reliability is so sporadic, it sucks. And it lies, so you don't know if you really have service or not until you actually try placing a call. But how do you test that, other than using it over a week and then concluding it’s still sporadic? What if it’s just a good week? So you can never really trust it, even if they fixed it. Grr. .AT&T sucks.

Oh, and btw, don’t get AT&T, they suck.