CHAPTER SIX
A couple of days passed.
Then a couple more.
Pretty soon a week was gone.
Then another week.
All in all, ten business days came and went, and during that entire time, I didn’t hear another word from Kevin or anyone associated with him or his company.
By May 22 I was…….let’s see…….how do I put this…..?
…….Damned Freakin’ Unhappy……..?
Yeah, that about covers it.
Now, that said, and just to keep this in perspective, I’m an adult. I’ve been walking the face of the planet for a while. I’ve been around the track a few times. I’ve got the waistline and gray hairs to prove it.
During my travels, there have been times when I’ve agreed to pay for the provision of a good or service, then found that once the seller had my cash in hand, they pretty quickly ceased to give a hoot about me or my interests. More often than not the focal point of such transactions have entailed less lofty topics, usually something along the lines of would you like some stewed gator meat on that pizza? or could I interest you in some whipped monkey pulp in your frappuccino? Things like that.
Of course in this case there wasn’t any food involved in the transaction. Still, the level of disinterest being shown by TCI seemed similar in nature to what I’d witnessed in fast food joints from coast to coast. At a minimum, it seemed to suggest that they had other ways to earn a living; something to fall back on, thereby enabling a lackadaisical approach to this one without fear of starvation setting in. Maybe something like -
“Care for some long distance today? No? Okay. How about a vacuum cleaner then? Hmmmm, what’s that? What are we doing selling vacuum cleaners? Well sir, as some have pointed out, our service really sucks, so we figured the best way to build our business was to utilize our strengths. Had a good Hoover lately? Want one?”
Well, okay, that was unfounded speculation on my part. Well, except for the part about the service sucks. The rest of it I made up. Sorry. My bad.
Still, it was hard to not wonder.
Now, where was I before I digressed?
Oh yes, the point is, like an actor who’s won an obscure award; like a politician who gathered a vote without paying for it; or like a Boston Red Sox fan of any description, the thrill of victory gives some people a sense of entitlement. It tends to produce visions of inflated self-importance, which in turn plants and nurtures a seed that one day grows into the full-fledged belief that they can look out on the world at large and haughtily proclaim –
DILLIGAF?
The question was, is that what was happening here? I mean I’d first asked my liaison guy to liaise a month earlier. Three times in a row he had promised he would, and three times in a row he had left me twisting in the wind. Was there a correlation here? Was this indisputable evidence that I was simply being flipped off? Was it just my imagination or were the words, “I’ll get back to you,“ starting to take on the timbre of a B Movie, increasingly sounding like something more along the lines of “Die Sucka, Die!”?
I was still debating that point when some new mail landed on my desk. I sifted the pile. Two envelopes immediately crashed into my awareness.
One was an invoice from AT&T. The other was an invoice from my old long distance provider; the one on whom I had pulled the plug some six or seven weeks earlier.
I opened them, reviewed the contents, and groaned.
My first thought was, the hits just keep on coming.
My second thought was, what the hell did I let these people get me into?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Because a long holiday weekend had been approaching when I opened the invoices, I let them sit for a few days. Memorial Day had been fast approaching, and I figured that like many pillagers of the countryside, folks at TCI were probably going to be distracted by visions of sailing on their yachts, taking their Lear’s to the Costa Del Sol, and other rituals attendant to ditching the proletariat for the unofficial first weekend of summer. Who knows, maybe they were in the market for a good Hoovering as well. I really wasn’t intimately familiar with how these people spent their leisure time.
And in fairness, part of the delay was my own desire for peace on earth and goodwill toward men, which I figured a pre-holiday discussion with one or more micro cephalic yahoos may not serve to promote. I suspected the latter would be particularly true if I were to actually use a phrase like micro cephalic yahoo, which I saw as the sort of thing that might, just might, accidentally slip out.
So I waited, and finally on Tuesday, May 26th I faxed a letter to Kevin, my “go-to” guy at Total Communications, Inc., aka TCI, of East Hartford, CT. It was a letter of medium duration. Because the details are not likely to be anything you’d find all that interesting, allow me to merely touch on the high points.
1) Remember the $84.00 in overcharges, then the $49.05 credit? Well, the credit had actually appeared on my new invoice. Hurray!!! But, the uncredited portion – which had still not been dealt with, or explained – was now showing as Past Due. Various thoughts went through my mind over this turn of events. I confess they were not all of the pleasant variety.
2) When my account was switched over to AT&T, someone had missed bringing over my toll-free number. Consequently, I had received a bill for continuing services from my old long distance carrier; a bill on which minimum usage charges had kicked in, as well as the myriad taxes, access fees, and other regulatory gobbledy-gook, the avoidance of which were among the reasons I’d switched to AT&T in the first place. I’d been of the impression that my old account was closed. To find that I was instead running a meter with two phone companies for the same service was the sort of revelation that did not exactly make me all warm and fuzzy about my most recent choice in telecommunications providers.
3) Next, falling firmly into the realm of what, in hindsight, I would categorize as a mountain of bovine…..stuff….., and I mean, we’re talking a mountain here of truly spectacular dimensions, someone found a way to take my international calls, which were supposed to be billed for about a nickel a minute, and run them through the system at rates that ranged from $1.16 per minute for calls to Canada, up to as much as $3.70 a minute for calls to Mexico. Courtesy of those rates, a couple hundred dollars was added to the bill.
4) And finally, I discussed the block of time package I’d bought into. Long story short, they had processed the wrong sized block. As I pointed out in my letter, it was not a major economic issue at the moment, but it did “stand as further evidence that you folks are having trouble getting much of anything right”.
So, after a written discussion of those matters, I finally observed that the move I‘d made for cost-saving purposes had, so far, in barely over a month, left me hosed for something right in the neighborhood of $300.00. I further opined that it was all beginning to look like the result of the “combined effects of incompetence, misrepresentation and, quite possibly, outright fraud.” I then added language to the effect that I was somewhat unhappy. Didn’t want to leave any room for doubt on that point.
Oh, and I gave them a deadline to fix it all. It was a short deadline, a couple of days, after which I promised that either our problems were going to be behind us, or we were going to “go back to the relationship we had before I allowed myself to be talked into doing business with you.”
I had no idea what they were going to do, though recent history suggested no worse than 50-50 odds that they would ignore it. I sat back and waited.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Early in the morning on May 27, the phone rang. It was Kevin. My “go-to” guy. It dawned on me that his presence at the other end of the line might have been nascent evidence that the road to catching this boy’s attention was to send nasty letters to his office.
Or maybe smack him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
Well, I confess I had not had the opportunity to try that one out, but it was an idea whose time, it seemed, might be close at hand.
Anyway, Kevin was on the phone, which itself was on speaker, and in the room with him was a gent whose name I failed to catch, but who claimed to be Kevin’s boss. Guess they decided it was time to bring in the cavalry. I wondered if the nameless boss had his own supply of rolled up newspapers.
After some major sucking up, mainly from the boss, who was clearly the alpha male on this mountainside, we ran down the list du jour of open issues.
1) I’ve mentioned in earlier installments that part of the deal from AT&T entailed “block of time” billing. For the uninitiated, block of time is rather similar in function to a prepaid cell phone. For a discounted but set monthly figure, I receive a fixed number of minutes to use in any way and at any time I desire. My calls are charged against that block of time until it has been exhausted, at which point conventional per-minute billing kicks in.
Well, it turns out that AT&T had failed to set up, and hence had failed to charge me for, any block of time cost on the April bill. When I raised my question about credit for $84.00 worth of inflated charges, they actually did issue the credit – eventually – but then, without explanation, added back in a new charge for $39.00 – which was for the block of time cost they had failed to bill. So, take the credit, subtract the charge, and the difference is………drum roll maestro……a credit for $49…..and five cents.
The root issue here? One billing mistake had been identified. There was actually two.
“Okay, that makes perfect sense,” I conceded once I’d heard it all. “The numbers add up. But wouldn’t it have been a hell of lot easier to offer that explanation at the outset instead leaving all of us wondering for weeks where the figure came from?”
A bit of mumbled agreement in return.
I looked around to see if I had a newspaper handy.
All I see is a phone book.
It’s a thought.
2) Sticking with the block of time theme, there is still one teensy, tiny little problem, I tell them. I bought a monthly block of pre-determined size and cost. I’ve been charged for a different plan.
The essence of the reply, and on this point I think it’s important to be sure I quote this correctly, was, “Ooops!”.
Or words to that effect.
Ah, but this one is an AT&T screw-up, the boss eagerly informs me. The order was correctly placed by TCI. It was AT&T that somehow got it wrong. He assures me it will be fixed right away.
Bad AT&T. Bad doggy.
Gotta get me some newspapers.
3) The excess international long-distance charges on the most recent bill are also being credited back, they proudly informed me. In fact. AT&T has promised to apply the credit immediately, so there is not even any need to wait for it to appear. They give me a figure and tell me to just go ahead and deduct it from my next payment. And by the way, that one is another AT&T screw-up.
Doggy is bad. Bad AT&T. Bad, bad, bad.
I eyeball the phonebook. AT&T is a big dog. I may need a bigger book.
4) On the failure to transfer my toll-free number, we briefly revert back to the “Ooops!” defense, after which Kevin gets unceremoniously thrown under the bus. An oversight on his part, the boss claims. Kevin was supposed to get an authorization form signed, but never did. That was faxed to me a short time later, signed and faxed back.
Bad Kevin. No chew-strip for you tonight.
With fault and blame thus established and distributed, I informed them that the oversight on my toll-free number had left me with an active PNG account on which eighty-six cents worth of calls, after being subjected to a litany of minimum usage fees and taxes and add-ons, had produced a $58.00 bill; this on an account that should have been closed. I thought about demanding a refund, but given that that they hadn’t even exhibited the ability to properly charge for their own services, it seemed unlikely they possessed the advanced skill set required to deal with third party billing issues. So I decided we’d stick to newspapers and parlor tricks for now, but I also made it clear that I’d better not get another bill from PNG like the last one.
The conclusion of the discussion was that everything had either been fixed already, or would be imminently. “We value your business,” they assured me. “We’re sorry things got off on the wrong foot, but everything should be fixed now and on-track now. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here.”
I pondered that for a second. By my read, their interest in cleaning up the issues seemed genuine enough, and if it was true that all of the solutions had already been put in place, then the worst should be over. I decided they’d spent enough time on the gangplank.
“Okay,” I told them, “I’ll take everything you’re saying at face value. But let there be no mistake – you’re on probation. This is your last chance to get it right. One more screw up, and I mean anything at all, and our relationship is over.”
And that, my friends, should be the end of the story, right?
Ah, if only that were true.
Sometimes bad doggies just refuse to learn.
