Story of the Day 3/17/2014

This story started about 5 week sago.
I could check for the exact date, if you would like.
Personally, I do better when the details are less fresh in my mind. There is less to be angry about.

It started with a text.

Many stories start with texts, but a lot of them are not re-tellable.

This one is.

Barely.

We have a cell phone plan. When I grew up, there was no such thing.
No cell phone plan, no cell phones except in Maxwell Smart's shoe.
If you have no idea who Maxwell Smart is, you obviously do not pre-date cell phones.
As for Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, that must have ended up causing lot of butt-dialing. I mean foot dialing, but the writers for the show didn't deal with cell phones in their real lives, so buttt dialing had yet to be discovered.
But back to our cell phone plan.

We have 5 of them. Five cell phones and one plan.
We've had the same service provider for years. I think since 1998, which makes us almost unheard of.
Customer loyalty went out before cell phone plans were invented.
Back in 1998, we had one cell phone- my husband's. He used it for work, for when he was on call.
Back in the Deark Ages of 1998, I thought that perhaps, some day, I would have a cell phone, but I had no way of envisioning every 2 year old in the country with a fully armed...whoops, APPed smart phone addictedly playing Angry Birds or whatever that age range is into.

Now we have 5 fully functioning phones on our plan with this very same company.
It is not that we love this company so much that we do not want to be lured away.
In fact, there are moments we despise this company.
There are moments when saying "T-Mobile" is tantamount to uttering a swear word.
We've had no end of problems with them, although, the problems seem to come at 2 year intervals, allowing us to be lulled into thinking that the company has improved.
Until the next big problem.

Since the last big problem had been about 26 months ago, I should have been prepared.
But I wasn't.

I got a text.
I get one , every month, letting me know that our checking account has been raided to pay for our monthly service plan of $119 dollars.
Okay, actually, letting me know that our charge card has been dinged for that amount.
That is a lot of money, although, for 5 phone with unlimited talk and text ( the text part being the important part, since most of our kids don't hear) it is not a bad deal.

But, this time, the text was a little different.

Someone had added a zero before the decimal point.

T-Mobil had apparently taken over $1,000 from our checking account.

Two phone calls later, I was told that they had erred.
They had even figured out how they had made the mistake and were very sorry, and that the charge card account had not yet been charged.
And this would be corrected before the amount was actually deducted.

Except that it wasn't.
It wasn't corrected- a fact I found out about a few weeks later.

Another two phone calls later, they admitted that a mistake had been made.

Yes, the same phrase as when I had originally called them.
But this was not for the first mistake, this phrase was uttered in response ego the second mistake.
And, while they could not put the money back into our checking account, or send us the difference, they would gladly credit it to our account.
Not to our charge card account, the one we had to pay the $1,030 to NOW or risk fees and interest, but to our T-Mobile account.

The woman from T-Mobile explained that it would be nice for us to have that balance. We wouldn't' have to pay any T-Mobile bills for a while.

I snidely commented that I did not feel that they were entitled to hold onto close to $1000 of our money for that many months without paying us interest and a fee for the inconvenience.

This elicited silence.
And then the response that they could not help me.

This did not sit well with me.
I asked the woman if she would be happy if they held onto her money for that long.
This did not get a response.

I asked to speak with supervisor, a manager, someone who was old enough to have to pay their own charge card bills.

After a bit more struggle to get them to understand why I did not think that they should just hold onto our money, it was determined that hey could actually refund the difference to our charge card.
despite the fact that they had previously told me that this would be impossible.

of course, we used to think that 2 years olds having their own cell phones was impossible.

Meanwhile, I am waiting, and cringing, for my next text from T-Mobile.