Fight the Phone Company

Last month I got a $600 surprise phone bill. I got my son a phone on a $15 per month plan. Because he's 11 and how much is he going to use his phone? Turns out he likes to play Minecraft online with his buddies who moved away, and they use their phones to talk to eachother. He had 2 weekends of that and racked up about 900 minutes of long distance. This $15 phone plan only gives you 100 long distance minutes. After that, it's $0.70 a minute, so, yeah. Surprise!

I called in and talked with them for an hour and 40 minutes. They knocked it down $300, which is better than $600, but I signed up for a plan that cost $15 a month. If I used 10x the normal long distance included in that plan, I'm thinking maybe a bill that costs 10x that amount ($150) would be fair. $300 was the best they could do.

So I complained to the government. In Canada, we have an organization called the CRTC - Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. They sort of police the big telecommunication companies. I put in a complaint with them, which they, in turn forward to the phone company and the company is required to respond under the watchful eye of the government.

I got a call back from the Phone Company yesterday - on a sunday, talked about the situation, said their data overage costs cap out at $50, so he's willing to treat this the same way in this instance, and my $600 surprise phone bill turned into a $65 phoned bill.

I had to work for this. The CRTC form was like 10 pages long, and I didn't think anything would come of it other than they file it under "customer feedback" and maybe "take it under consideration" (which basically means they think about doing something, but probably do nothing). But I work in Quality Assurance and I have faith that customer complaints can help make the world a better place. So I dutifully raised a stink because I felt like it was the right thing to do. And I saved $550 on what would have otherwise been a $600 phone bill.