Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Cell Phone COMPANIES are the DEVIL!


errrrrrrrrr... so the end of the "cell phone bill-month" is creeping up on mom and I. We are just a couple minutes shy of our 500 shared minutes with free IN-calling, free nation-wide, and free nights/weekends. As you probably know from prior personal experience with cell phones yourself... this is a huge inconvenience for the both of us, but especially me because I rely solely upon my cell phone as a means of contact.

Mom and I are IN... ya know, the Verizon deal where it doesn't use any of my peak minutes to talk to Mom or anyone else who is IN. Be aware that not all Verizon users are IN - that's a catch and a half. Anyway, I checked our minute status online to find that - without her or I using the phone for the last day - our minutes magically crept up to 503 from 492. Hmmmm, interesting. So I call mom - which is free - who doesn't answer... I leave a message telling her to QUIT USING THE PHONE (this is because I assumed it was her since I knew that I wasn't). A little after I made the call to mom I checked our minutes online another time and AGAIN they had magically crept to 509. At this point I figured it wasn't magic, but I still didn't understand.

So there was a couple new voicemails just lingering on my cell for the last couple days just teasing me. Finally I thought of the genius idea to use the land phone line at home to call my cell phone, wait for my voice message to start and key in my 4 digit pin number to access my voicemails and such. Genius idea worked. After reviewing all my voicemails, fooling around with settings, and updating my extended absence greeting over several made calls that added up to around 40-some minutes, I was haunted with the thought that maybe it wasn't a genius idea afterall. So I check the online minute status once more for fun - I really was just trying to scare myself into thinking that it might affect our bill. But to my complete and utter furious surprise I found that it had shot up to 554 minutes!

THE CATCH. So clearly we can conclude that I was being charged minutes to access my voicemail when I wasn't even using my cell phone but instead my home phone. Did anybody else know this or should I just be humbled by my complete ignorance? What's worse is my theory about the first couple magical minutes that put mom and I just over the top... and I came to the assumption that I must have been charged for leaving mom a voicemail - what else could it be, really? My theory is that leaving voicemails is separated from free IN-calling and written in fine print somewhere on our contract above our signed names.

Why would cell phone companies go to such an obvious extent to do this? Well the answer is simple, really: the almight buck. So numerous are the catches in a cell phone contract, but so enslaved we are to the use of a cell phone that the endless charges seem a mere sacrifice in comparison. Cell phone companies say things like "Verizon: we never stop working for you" and "Can you hear me know? Good!" and "Sprint PCS built the only all digital all PCS nation-wide network. So your calls are clear" and "Cingular: raising the bar"..... I think you get the point. That is, Cell Phone Companies are more concerned with the quality of their product than the quality of their service. They have what we want, they pretend to have good deals but keep us in the dark, and all the while we are paying them up the you-know-exactly-what.

Mom suggested I should call Verizon and plead my ignorance to see if they will show me grace this one time. I say I'd rather pay an extra 40 cents a minute than to deal with the Devil.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ok so Verizon ended up taking off the extra minutes and our monthly total was just under at 497. and even though the cell phone companies don't care that you are paying an absurd amount of moolah for their plans, they are incredibly good about customer service. I spent 47 minutes on the phone with verizon and tier 2 about my picture/text messaging delivery failures and one of the reasons for the problem was because my phone was roaming. this contributes to other problemas as well.... soooo if you experience random problems with your phone use and if your phone is roaming dial *228 and when the lady comes on press 1... it should reprogram your phone so that it won't roam anymore. (im pretty sure its verison users only).