Phone Bill

As the old song says, “Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side of life.” I would add, stay on the funny side of life. If I go down laughing I figure I will have cheated the Grim Reaper of his pound of grief. I’ve seen too many people who have wasted their golden years by going sour and negative and living too much in the good old days instead of the present.

BUT…the phone bill came. It still contained the same three bogus collect calls we worked with the phone company to correct the previous billing cycle and it threatened late charges if we did not pay in full. Originally the calls were not bogus and we paid for them; it was only when they tried to charge us a second time for the same calls (exact same time of day, exact same length of call, different date) that I got miffed. Since the phone company was using the same phony date for all three calls, two of the collect calls supposedly took place at the same time, an impossibility.

Because the phone company had outsourced operated assisted calls to a separate billing company, I contacted that billing company first and talked to Jeremiah. He assured me that we had received a credit for the calls in question and that credit had been passed on to yet another outsourced billing company and would eventually reach the phone company’s billing department in another billing cycle or two. How many layers of outsourcing did the phone company have! In this day and age of electronic data transfer systems and the internet, when I can chat instantaneously with someone on the other side of the world, I am amazed that a single corporation cannot transfer billing data within its own structure in a single billing cycle.

Next I called the phone company’s own billing department to pass on to them that Jeremiah had given us a credit and that we should not be charged late payment fees. (Why Jeremiah could not make this same call, I don’t know.) I talked with a computerized answering machine for 15 minutes, answering numerous yes or no questions and pressing a bunch of telephone buttons and listening to infomercials and disclaimers when, for no obvious reason the system hung up on me.

I dialed back, got the same computerized woman’s voice and was asked for the last eight digits of my billing code, which I read off with careful enunciation. The code contained a 77 but when the computer read it back, it only got one 7. “Is this your correct billing code number?” “No.” “Try again.” On the third try I punched the numbers in off my phone instead of speaking and the computer still read back only one 7. “Is this your correct billing code number?” “Yes,” I lied and finally got out of the death cycle. After a small eternity of “all our operators are busy at the moment… please leave a number and we will call you,” I finally heard a weak, fuzzy, mechanical-sounding voice mutter some well- rehearsed line. “Are you a real person?” “Yes.” Hallelujah, Houston we have touchdown!

As I began registering my complaint to Jessica, she began interrupting me with “You are mistaken…You don’t understand our system”… and so on. I continued coolly, explaining what Jeremiah had said and that I had just gotten off the phone with him. It took the part about being billed for two calls on the same day at the same time to convince her. She put a freeze on any late charges, although the error would possibly continue to appear on the next two billing cycles. (Man, their electronic data system must be slow!)

Immediately after freezing the late payment charges, Jessica launched into a sales spiel to get me to bundle my TV cable with land line telephone. She seemed oblivious to the irony that while I was complaining about her company’s services, she was trying to sell me more services. “I don’t have cable TV,” I said. There was a momentary pause, then “Don’t you want to get cable? Don’t you watch a lot of television?” “I watch very little TV; I read a lot” There was a much longer pause as it took time to sink in just what a backwoods rube she was dealing with. This was good because now I had a chance to get my second bill complaint in.

We had used all our allotted long distance minutes on our plan and a little more; yet we were charged a short fall fee or minimum charge. How could we have gone over our limit and still not have met the minimum charge? “We are REQUIRED to charge the short fall fee because of the new regulations,” she said. It sounded fishy. “Are those new government imposed regulations or just the phone company’s new regulations?” There was silence. “Hasn’t the phone company just raised its prices without informing us?” I asked. “Yes,” she said quietly. I realized the conversation was being taped and she was trying to give the company line to keep her job. Jessica doubled our long distance minutes so that at least we would not be charged an overage fee and a short fall fee at the same time. I think it was the best she could do.

So here I be…waiting two more billing cycles…and staying on the funny sunny side. It’s all just a big joke, anyway!