The never-ending foolishness with communications companies is ... well, never-ending. This week we got a threat from Frontier Communications to disconnect our phone service because we were past due on payments. This threw me for a loop, because I am the one who pays the bills. And I keep careful records. Our checkbook has carbons and I make a note on every paid bill (date paid, check number, amount, my initials) and file the bill. So I went through my records and indeed I could find no checks or bills to indicate that we had paid. It was a mystery, but thinking perhaps the bill had been lost during my time in Texas or in the confusion when I was taking care of bills for a friend, I went online and paid by credit card. (I might mention that the disconnect notice gave us three days to mail the payment in -- to another state, of course, because nothing is local, not even your local phone service). Like you could count on a check getting there and being posted in three days!
At any rate, I paid -- with the added service charge for using their automated credit card payment line, because after all, it is another chance to gouge you. Bill you and then charge you for paying your bill!
Then today Tom got an email reminder that our online payment for an account (the number is not the same as the number on our bill) is due in four days. Nothing there about how much we owe. After trying to figure it out, it looks like they moved us to online billing without our agreeing to it or authorizing it. Tom had told me he got an online bill from them, but at the time we were getting paper bills, so I told him to just ignore it. The bill had been paid. So since then, when he has received online bills, he just deletes them. But they stopped sending us paper bills after two months. So we have not been paying bills because (1) they were sending only online bills (2) to the person who does not pay the bills, although the account is in his name. I had asked Tom about online payment long ago, but he doesn't like it precisely because of the potential for mess ups of this sort.
So when he tried to call to figure out what is going on, they have only automated customer service on the weekend and he will have to call again on Monday. He went online to try to look at the account, and after figuring out how to get into it, discovered that the online service provides him with no useful information about anything.
Grrrrr! So, folks, if Frontier comes to your town (they took over our old Verizon account), think hard about it and read all the fine print. I imagine we are going to be out a few hundred dollars, plus the damage to credit ratings all due to poor COMMUNICATIONS again from the communications company.
It's enough to make me want to dump the landline, but cell phone carriers have their own problems. Anyone interested in going back to using pen and ink?
UPDATE: (Later the same day) I was talking to someone who lives on Christmas Mountain up the road from us, and they just had the same problem with Frontier. Her husband called to see what was going on, and he was told he had signed up for online billing. He assured them that he had not. There's clearly a glitch somewhere!
UPDATE II: I just read my email, which included a message from yet another neighbor who had the same hassle with Frontier. I am assuming their customer service people are tearing their hair out trying to calm down a lot of angry customers
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