Journal Entry

« Weekend Update | Journal Main Page | Great Search List »

:: Fight The Evil Power ::

Yesterday I had an encounter with my beloved phone company, SBC [So Big and Cumbersome?]. The squeaky, or perhaps bitchy, wheel definitely seems to get the grease.

Here's what happened.

While waiting for DSL to be installed, I was using dialup. Speakeasy provides free dialup while you wait for your install, but the service was spotty. I decided to go with Juno, since they offer software for Mac OS X. I don't need this software, but if I figure if they're taking the trouble to overtly support Mac OS X, I would support them.

Their dialup software chooses access numbers from a big database, and dials them for you. It prompts you for your phone number, in theory to find the number closest to you. Actually, it just finds a number that isn't long distance. On their website (I found out later) they will give out the closest number, but in their software, no such luck.

This became important when I got our first phone bill. Normally we get bills on the order of $22-30 at most. This one was almost $200. We don't use call waiting, we don't make many local calls, and we don't have long distance. How could this be? I called SBC all worked up in a lather, and they explained. The phone number I was calling was Local Toll, which means it was over 15 miles from my local central office, where the phone gets routed.

Without an SBC "Saver Pack", where you pay a flat fee for up to 200 (or more) calls of any length, Local Toll costs anywhere from 5 to over 50 cents per minute. When I called SBC, they told me I was lucky that it was only 10 cents a minute, it could have been a lot more.

How was I to know whether the number I was calling was truly local? I could have called SBC and waded through lots of menus and people to find out. Or I could have used their not-easy-to-find Local Call Tool to find out.

Chicago is big. It's at least 20 miles from tip to tail, and I live very far north now. My central office may be as far north as you can go in Chicago. And the dialup number I was using was way down in the south side, almost as far south as you can go. This is bad, and it's the reason the calls were so expensive.

Eventually, SBC was sympathetic, and took off half the cost of the local toll calls. That cut the bill drastically. It was still too much, but since dialup is a work expense for me, it is a little bit less insulting.

Yesterday I called about the next bill, which was also way too much. We've had DSL for months now, and I knew I wasn't making any more calls. Apparently SBC didn't discount all the calls I had make up until the day I called and complained. They only adjusted what was on the bill. There were a couple more days where there was lots of dialup, and those didn't appear on the first bill.

I was pretty irate, and threatened to disconnect the line. I would love to disconnect this phone line, but it's required for DSL. Still, I would do it if they pissed me off enough. The person I spoke with insisted that this couldn't be done, so I insisted that he transfer me to his supervisor. Instead, he spoke with the supervisor himself, and came back after a couple minutes to tell me they were crediting back all of the local toll from the second bill. This wasn't just half, it was the whole thing.

Imagine if I had threatened disconnection last time?

Anyway, the point is that SBC will listen to you if you are really mad about it. In the age of cell phones, they're probably not finding it as easy to keep customers in their near-monopoly, so they will do more if you ask for it and are persistent. It's worth keeping in mind.

And always check your dialup number with whatever tools your phone company hides somewhere. Call them if you have to, and save yourself future aggravation.