grrrr grr grrr! we had bell atlantic dsl for one month back in september. the service was so horrible (once it was finally running) that we cancelled it and got a different isp. THEY HAVE NOT STOPPED BILLING US FOR IT. we got a bill in late spring from them for $500 of dsl charges. we had to fight over the phone with them, getting passed back anf forth till they finally told us not to pay it (duh) and that they are stopping the billing. so we get a bill the next month for the dsl. we start all over again. they say don’t pay it – it will be stopped. so today we get a letter that is dated a week ago, saying we have 10 days to pay for the dsl WE DON’T EVEN HAVE or it will be disconnected. dan has been struggleing on the phone and in emails with them all day. they have the business hours of a bank. here is a reply they sent to him:
my translation:
|
Stvlive.com
as a former agent of bellatlantic, i can affirm, you have hit the nail on the head . . . most of the things it does are subcontracted out, so no one really gives a rats rectum . . . i used to have a poster of james earl jones in a BA ad, with the caption, “i want to believe” up in my cubicle . . .
good luck 😉
I had the same problem with my phone bill and MCI. they were charging me this stupidly high rate on international calls when I was on a plan that made the rates really low. I kept calling them and telling them I had been told i was on that plan and after about an hour of fighting with them they would say, “oh yeah, I see where the problem is. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it so just disregaurd that note” So I would and then the next month it would start all over again! Each time getting more unbelievably high. Then I got transfered to a real asshole who told me the people I had been talking with didn’t really no anything about my bill but he did and I was going to have to pay it all. The bill was now well over a thousand bucks so i was completely frustrated. Finally, I called AT&T as a last resort. They said if i switched to them they would pay it all off for me. I jumped on that one! Then MCI called saying, “why don’t you switch back to us” So I explained my story of how MCI tried to take me for over a thousand dollars to this stupid little phone boy and his best response was “Hey why don’t you just give us another try!” I think my words right before slamming the phone on him were something like “FUCK THAT!”
don’t even get me started on the monkey shit I went through with Bell Satanik doing my lines with CAIS Internet..I still have doubts as to the “completeness” on my loop.
dated bills and cancelation notice
check your credit report now!
my money says they’ve already filed something since its been three months. could hurt morgage.
sorry to be bearer of bad news. but they’re assholes and are prompt on their own money matters with no care for ours.
Phone Companies/Long Distance – GRRRRRRRRR
Last year our phone number was changed – right out of the blue. I didn’t even find out about it until about two weeks after the dirty deed had happened. Needless to say, I probably have lots of company in my telephone/long distance complaints, I spent the next 6 months talking endlessly to layers and layers of people at the other end of the customer service lines. Everyone claiming to be “the one” that would fix my little problem. It was a huge mess. Had to inform all interested people/companies of our new phone number. My boyfriend didn’t understand why it just didn’t take one phone call to straighten out the situation and have the phone company just change our number back to our old one. So the phone company caused multiple headaches and many hours of stress for me – needlessly. That was August of last year and nothing has been done. I am giving up on any retribution or compensation for my headaches and time. If anyone knows of any killer idea that works with those customer service reps – I would certainly like to know.
Then my second headache was with AT&T (I think anyway) – I get a call from my boyfriend telling me that he can’t make a long distance call – didn’t I make the phone payment? That lead to endless calls to several customer service reps to figure out why my long distance was discontinued. No feasible reason was given – my idea is that it was just zapped – like my phone number. I was put back on AT&T as my long distance carrier – but of course you have to wait two or three days for that to go back in to effect again (more hassel). Then about two weeks after that – David is calling me again saying he can’t make a long distance call. ARGH! Again, I go through the endless customer service rep crap and get a rep finally that says – I don’t see any reason why you don’t have long distance – gee – why don’t you check it out lady! So she actually puts me on hold for almost 45 minutes and comes back and says the problem has been solved – some computer code was corrupted (or something to that effect). Argh. But I do get my long distance back again. That has been almost a month ago.
You never know when something absolutely stupid is going to happen with your phone service or which stupid (or just plain doesn’t care) customer service rep you’re going to get who is “going to solve your problem” next.
Gee – that felt good getting it off my chest . . . Especially since my boyfriend has no clue to the customer service hell that you have to go through each time (I think he is living in a bubble).
Anyway, best of luck to all of you on solving your problems.
Yup, telcos suck ass
I get to deal with telcos from another viewpoint, the company I work for is one of the few companies that still makes large-scale telephone switching systems (among other things). I can tell you that telcos employ some of the most brain-deficient people out there, even as their technical staff.
They’ve repeatedly done some of the most retarded things with their switches, the kinds of things that nobody thought to say not to do because of the assumption that everyone has common sense. Heh, not even. The longest outage on one of our switches (upwards of 30 hours with NO dialtone) was the result of a bored (and incredibly stupid) telco tech playing around with a particularly dangerous switch command. It was something that would not take affect until a restart. Well, the switches usually go for years without being restarted. This one lasted a few months before someone restarted it and… nothing. The switch refused to come back up. All of their backups were screwed too because they all had the change that the idiot had made. I’m surprised it only took 30+ hours to get the thing back up.
On the subject of losing long distance service suddenly and the telco playing innocent: the switch might have been rolled back to a previous image, thus killing off any recently added data (like the long distance PIC or CAC asigned to your line). They’re supposed to keep logs (automatically done on the switch) of what happens, but I know that the logging can be turned off and/or the logs can be deleted with ease.
It always pisses me off when telcos take a week or more to get anything about my line changed. Why do I get pissed off? Because I know exactly how long it takes to make those damn changes. The overwhelming majority of changes can be made in a few seconds, tops. 3-way calling, call forwarding, changes to long distance carriers, etc. require very little effort. The only thing I can think of at the moment that would really require setup time would be provisioning an ISDN line for use with a… wait for it… ISDN phone. ISDN phones are an abomination. Evil, evil, evil… Come to think of it, ISDN in general is an abomination 🙂
If you haven’t figured it out by now, the driving force behind telcos doing ANYTHING is money, and lots of it. They don’t really care about situations like yours, because it doesn’t impact them very much. But if they run into a situation where they start losing billing records, ohhh boy, they get VERY interested.
oh no! that’s the only one we can get in our area. Meep! They’re the reason I have no DSL for a month… because they say they cannot flip a switch to turn it on until the 31st… we’re doing the installation ourselves, so they don’t have to do anything but turn it on. Bastards.