This morning Adam Savage  – the ubergeek celeb host of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters – received an unpleasant surprise from AT&T, the exclusive network vendor to which all iPhone-philes are beholden.  The phone company informed Savage that he racked up $11,000.00 in data charges on a recent trip to Canada and shut down his account until he paid up. Contending that he only did a few hours of surfing on a USB cell modem, Savage was further infuriated by AT&T’s claim that he managed to transfer 9 gigabytes of data in that time.

Source: TweetStats.com

His reaction was pure nerd revenge manifested in a single tweet.  “I will fight this bullshit.”

Less than an hour later, Savage incited a full scale revolt on Twitter, causing “AT&T” to even eclipse the newsworthy Iran Election tweets and “#michaeljackson” hashtag in popularity. The television host’s updates garnered scores of thousands of retweets, taking the AT&T brand from zero to top trend by mid-day.

The television host continued to feed the rabid mob with vignettes of his customer service experience, including the familiar confusion of AT&T customer service reps about the difference between “a penny and a half” and “0.015 cents.”

In less than three hours, Savage reported that AT&T was starting to budge and that he was expecting a call that might restore his service.  In that short span, one dork used the Internet to re-screw his would-be corporate rapists out of a $11,000 bill.

After blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and now Twitter, one would think AT&T would learn – you can’t fuck with a geek.

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