CHAPTER THREE
The first dark cloud appeared just about three weeks after I signed up with AT&T. Somewhere during the week of the 20th of April I received an invoice. The closing date was April 15th, which meant it reflected two weeks of activity under our “old” relationship, and two weeks under the new agreement.
As background, let me explain that we often make a lot of phone calls each month….a few thousand in a slow month, over 10,000 when it’s busy. Consequently, a major concern for me is the cost of each phone call, which is, in turn, driven by two factors. The first is the per-minute rate, which is pretty self-explanatory, and the second is the incremental billing unit. We produce a lot of short phone calls – get a machine and hang up – so the latter is fairly important. My deal with AT&T was for just $.05 per minute, billed in ten-second increments. Simple. Right?
So, my April bill arrived and I was instantly greeted with a list of calls, a couple of pages worth, the detail of which showed they had been billed at $.56 per minute (not $.05) with an incremental billing unit of a full sixty seconds (not ten seconds). Not quite the deal I had been sold, or agreed to.
Oddly, the incorrect cost appeared on only two days of the billing period; April 13th and 14th. There was something decidedly strange about that, in that they had it right for two weeks, and then started getting it wrong. To this day I’ve not been given a plausible explanation as to what happened, or why, but this much is perfectly clear – someone at AT&T changed something on April 13th, and as a result my costs for a couple of days went up by a factor of more than ten. Not a bad deal for AT&T, but not the sort of thing that’s likely to go unnoticed.
Well, not by me anyway. I can’t speak for other people.
Because the damage was limited to only two days of the billing period, it wasn’t life-changing money we were talking about – only $84.00 – but if it continued for weeks, months or years……well, like Everett Dirkson once said, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
So, enter my friends at Total Communications, Inc., aka TCI, out of East Hartford, CT. You may recall that TCI’s new reason for existing was to be my “liaison”, my “go-to” solution whenever I needed something related to telephone service. Being that this seemed to fall within that realm, on or about April 23rd I called Kevin the sales guy at TCI. You remember him, right? He was last seen mentally fondling a commission check. While it came a little quicker than I might have imagined, it was already time for Kevin to earn his pay.
After reaching Kevin I began to explain that we seemed to have some billing issues, and as I launched into an explanation of what had happened, I was pleased to learn that he had online access to my bill and could see exactly what I was looking at and talking about. Kevin was, of course, instantly and appropriately aghast, totally mystified, and eager to spew a tidal wave of mea culpas. He promised that the matter would be promptly looked into and rectified.
“Someone will be back to you as soon as we have everything figured out and resolved,” he assured me.
While I’m not all that pleased that my very first bill was incorrect, I’m enough of a realist to know that such things happen from time to time. So, with Kevin in my corner, I put the matter aside and devoted myself to trying to make a few bucks.
CHAPTER FOUR
Somewhere around the first of May I realized that the April phone bill, still awaiting formal notification of how much credit was to be applied, remained an open item. While the quick and simple approach would have been to just deduct the over-billed amount and submit an adjusted payment, sadly, the economic aspects of the telecommunications industry have become such a morass of government driven economic legerdemain that the words simple and phone bill are no longer allowed to exist in the same sentence.
Yeah, yeah, despite the fact that they just did.
The problem is there are….I don’t know….maybe seventy or eighty lines of taxes, fees, surcharges and other forms of arcane, esoteric, technical sounding who-ha that gets added to my phone bill each month. Most of it is couched in government-speak; that unique application of language that hides extortionary intent under the cloak of euphemistic misdirection. One of my monthly line items is a charge for a Federal Regulatory Fee. I rest my case.
Sometimes these regulatory money-grabs are tacked on as flat fees; other times as percentages, though in my experience it is nearly impossible to figure out what those percentages are percentages of. And don’t look for guidance anywhere on the bill. The formulas are all a secret. Pickpockets in the New York subways wish they could operate as smoothly.
Sadly, because of that lack of transparency, attempting to calculate or verify my charges appears to require access to several supercomputers, a team of quantum physicists, the proper alignment of the fourth moon of Jupiter, and enough electricity to power Romania for a year. All I‘ve got at my disposal is a small desk calculator. Plastic. Solar powered.
So, I called Kevin again. You know, Kevin, my go-to guy. The person who was supposed to have liaised on my behalf as a means of getting me an explanation of what had occurred and what would be done to fix it. I reached him on the first try, then let a hint of displeasure filter into my voice as I informed him that I was still waiting for a reply.
“Oh!” he said. “No one ever got back to you?”
Ah, the lifeblood of any bureaucracy; pass the buck. Not the response I was expecting. Not the one I wanted to hear.
I quickly debated some known and trusted applications of sarcastic understatement to illustrate what a brilliant piece of deduction I found his response to be. Eventually, I settled on what I call my slow-cooker reply. Instead of saying anything, I merely grunted. The sound of disapproval traveled unfettered to East Hartford. I was certain of it.
Confirming that he got the message, I was promptly fed deep-dish servings of disbelief and apology. I think I may have even heard an inference or two that heads would soon be rolling. All of it was delivered with such a full dose of sycophantic urgency that I drew the unfettered conclusion he would actually follow up on it this time.
He promised he would be back to me as soon as he could.
Again.
CHAPTER FIVE
I had last spoken to Kevin around May 1. Eleven days later, on Monday the 11th, I paused and took inventory of the number of times I had communicated with him, or for that matter, anyone else from either TCI or AT&T, in the days since. Care to take a guess? Oh, go on. Give it a try.
Here’s a hint. It’s a real, real, real low number.
Phone calls? None.
Letters? Zero.
Emails? Nope.
Smoke signals? Carrier pigeons? Telegrams? Psychic transmissions?
Uh-uh! Nothing on any front. Not a thing.
As I pondered that situation for a spell, there seemed to be little question that the relationship I’d thought I was buying into had – so far – fallen a fair distance short of what was promised. Mind you, these were not earth shaking, end of the world sort of problems I was facing, but the continuing failure to deal with them was definitely beginning to move them up on the annoyance scale.
Notwithstanding the cold reality that getting perfect customer service these days is far more often a matter of surprise than expectation, I’d definitely anticipated a bit more liaising and a whole lot more “go-to”-ing than I’d seen to date. Hell, if an answer wasn’t available, getting a simple acknowledgement of that……..getting SOMETHING………would have been preferable to the resounding sounds of silence.
“Oh! No one ever got back to you?”
No, they did not.
Again.
I concluded it was time to start getting some of this on paper. If nothing else, I wanted to impart the message that TCI’s performance to date was not the stuff that long-term partnerships were made of. I learned a long time ago that the longer you let a problem languish, the harder it becomes to ever deal with it. Ask General Motors.
So a letter was composed and faxed to TCI on that same day; the 11th of May. The letter included a recap of the original problem with the April bill, a regurgitation of the actions that had been promised but not fulfilled, and an editorial comment or two about the underwhelming nature of their performance to date. I also pointed out that because the invoice in question was approaching the due date, I was being forced to make my own adjustment, and was including a copy of the letter with the payment I was about to send out.
Confirming that definitive proactivity can sometimes get constipated wheels turning, the very next day I received a phone call from……you guessed it, Kevin.
“I have news,” he informed me straight away. “Sorry this took so long, but AT&T has agreed to provide you with a credit for the calls that were over-billed on your April invoice.”
“Really,” I replied. “Well, it took them long enough, didn’t it? But, better late than never, I suppose.”
“I agree. The credit, by the way, is for forty-nine dollars. $49.05 to be precise.”
“I beg your pardon?” I verbally raised a hand. Had I misheard him? “Did you say forty-nine dollars?”
“Yep,” he confirmed my hearing. “Forty-nine dollars. And five cents.”
“Right. And five cents.” Okay, I was thinking to myself, what’s going on? Did one of us just step into a Romulan time-warp? Finally, “Kevin, forgive me if I fail to get all weepy with gratitude here, but maybe you would be kind enough to take a run at explaining to me where the forty-nine dollar figure came from?”
“What do you mean?” he asked cautiously, sounding a little taken aback that I wasn’t jumping for joy over his news.
“What I mean is, my recollection is that the over-billed amount was $84.00.”
“Uh…..yeah?” Kevin replies with sudden caution. He seems to finally understand where this is going, but he’s not offering anything.
“Simple question. How did we end up with a credit for $49?”
“Ummm….” he mumbles, trying to buy time, his growing discomfort evident even from 45 miles away, “that’s the amount they calculated the overcharges came to,” he finally offered.
“By they you mean AT&T?”
“Right.”
“And did you ask whoever gave you this number how they arrived at it? Is there a formula of some kind being employed? Was a dartboard used? Maybe a ouija board was brought into play?”
“Actually, I found a message on my voice mail when I came in today.” I can imagine him squirming on the other end of the line as he adds, “I didn’t personally get a chance to talk to anyone.”
No kidding, I think to myself.
“Are you going to try to change that?” I suggest.
“Sure, no problem. I’ll see what I can find out and I’ll get back to you as soon as I do.”
It was about the same thing he’d said the last time we spoke. A few hurried platitudes and then click, he was gone.
After we’d hung up, I was left to ponder what I’d just heard.
Various thoughts went through my mind.
Optimism wasn’t one of them.
