NP: British Sea Power, Open Season

Ah, nothing gets a morning going like berating a customer service representative until they give you what you want. Except, maybe, berating TWO customer service representatives at the same time.

When I switched my phone service back in February, somebody seemed to forget to tell my long-distance carrier. As a result, I've been billed strictly for administrative charges for the last two or three months. Since I auto-pay the bill, I had only a vague notion this was going on, and hadn't looked at it too closely.

So I called my new provider first, to make sure they had told my previous long distance company about the change. They offered to conference the latter in so we could get to the bottom of it. Old company had no record of my canceling service. Oddly enough, they had a record of a note explicitly continuing service about a month into my tenure with the new guys. Despite that particular fuckup, they were not terribly contrite about it, so they became victim of Coz's wrath number one.

This got me no refund, and largely no hope for a refund, so I turned my attention to the new guys. When I signed up for service, I explicitly asked if I had to manually cancel my old providers, and they said no. When pressed, they hemmed and hawed and played semantics with local providers and third-party verification, but I wore them out and got them to credit me with the money I had paid to the other guys, with the possible exception of one month that may or may not have been billed yet.

So, even though I may be on the hook for six bucks and change, for service I wasn't receiving, I'm chalking this one up as a win. I'm not practicing drums enough right now, so I need somewhere to channel that angry energy.