Rant: Telus Again

Okay, so Chris called to complain about the discrepancies in our phone bill, again, and they were less than helpful. Grr. If there was another home phone line provider offered in this area, and we could afford to take the penalty of getting out of our three year contract early...

What happened first was that the first person I dealt with signed us up for the wrong long distance plan, one which cost us a lot of money. When I got our first bill and noticed the problem, I called and the person I dealt with apologised for the problem and said she'd "re-rate" our phone bill and it would show up on the next bill. I was supposed to pay that month's bill as it stood, and then the changes would show up on the next one.

We got our next bill, and it turned out that "re-rate" meant that she would switch us to the new plan as of that day and that was it. And the new plan meant you had to pre-pay for the next month, and so there was that month's long distance charge, the next month's long distance, plus $20 worth of long distance calls that apparently I made the day before I called Telus to complain. When I called Telus again, the lady I dealt with said the only thing she could do was cut the $20 of extra phoning in half. And that was it.

That was two months in a row where our phone bill was between $140-165.

So, when Chris called today to clarify all the problems on our bill first: they explained away charges that didn't make sense on our bill, and then they said they would do nothing about all the over-charges with the long distance because it would be "our word against theirs". We may have just seen our bill and decided that maybe we shouldn't have decided for the 9 cents a minute all day.

Maybe I was spoiled in Saskatchewan. With SaskTel, my sister realised that their North America All Day plan would make more sense than the Canada Evenings and Weekends (with her North Carolinian roommate), and when she called she found out that they had made the same realisation months ago, that they were consistently phoning the United States and would be saving money if they were on the other plan, and so they just switched it for them. I know they're extra-cranky with their lock-out going on, but this is ridiculous.

(Now that we've cancelled their long distance plan and switched to Rogers, if they don't refund us the money we pre-paid for this month's long distance... At least that's documented.)