[strider3700]

Well my new wife is prepairing to move into my house and today she called to cancel her phone and DSL service with Telus (our local/only telephone company). cancelling the phone is not a problem but to cancel DSL she has to pay $120. This is because of some rate protection thing that she got when she signed up for both phone and dsl service. If you didn't get it basically it was noticably more per month. So much for bundling being enough to get a discount, now you need to bundle and lock in for 3 years.

Now that pisses me off, but the part that really gets me is she can transfer the account since I don't have DSL at my place. The problem is I don't have DSL because it doesn't work at my house.
I know this because it took them 2 months where they charged me for phone service and the phone hookup fees because the phone worked just fine. Too bad I didn't want the phone just DSL but you can't get one without the other.

At the end they didn't charge me for the DSL which never worked but I had to mail the modem to them. Fine whatever I ran around one day to the post office and mailed the modem to them. 2 months later I got a bill because they lost the modem and said I had never returned it. A few more hours out of my time and we had that all sorted out. They did recieve the modem but can't locate it anymore. So they removed the modem charge from my account. All was nice and done I thought.

One month later a bill arrived for the interest on the late modem payment because I hadn't paid for the modem while they had lost it. A quick phone call got me all of the information from them about having lost the modem but I had to deal with a different department who for some reason couldn't review those records to correct the interest problem. They asked me to fax in a copy of the records. So I faxed this person the records, a copy of the invoice and a nice note in Giant bold lettering saying go fuck yourselves. The next month I got a statement saying I owed nothing and my ordeal to get DSL from telus came to an end. It took about 6 months from the time I signed up to the time it was all sorted out and it cost me about $180 for the phone hookup and the 2 months of phone service which I never even plugged a phone into.

This was supposed to be the last thing I ever did with that company but now I've got the exact same problem again. Having done the math It's cheaper for me to pay the $120 penalty to get out of the existing contract then it is to have them hook up the phone and then take another 2 months to prove that DSL won't work. Thats not including the time spent where I can stay at home all day waiting for them to come to hook it up. Hell hookup fee for a phone thats been inactive is just shy of $100 last time I looked into it.

So Does anyone else have any excellent hate ons for phone or cable companies? On that topic I can't speak highly enough about shaw cable, Sure it's like getting a slap in the face every couple of days, it's still better then the prison raping I get from telus.

[128shot]

I think the problem with telecom companies is that they're often sheer monopolies in Rural areas and in sectioned neighboorhoods. In some places there is decent competition and they seem to have the best service there for that reason.