Cell Phone Invoice

After living in Ohio for over six months, I finally decided to change my cell phones from California phone numbers. Since I didn’t want to pay the early termination fees and since I couldn’t afford new cell phones, I decided to stick with my current provider (Sprint PCS). It only took about a half hour over the phone to get everything switched over. That’s a bit longer than I expected, but it wasn’t too bad. It definitely beats having to go to a store.

When I got my invoice today, I was a bit surprised. The total was more than $200.00. My wife and I hardly use our cell phones, so I figured that it must be some sort of mistake. After scanning the nine pages of our invoice (that contained only 15 calls), I found the problem: I was charged two $150.00 cancellation fees, but I only got credited for one of them. Ugh. Time to put another phone call in. The CSR that I talked to was very nice and apologetic. She admitted that a mistake was done to my account and that she would credit the remaining $150.00. I’m not too surprised though. I most likely would have kept calling until I got the bill straightened out.

Fortunately this time it wasn’t much of a hassle. I’ve called my landline phone company (CenturyTel) about my invoice before and they thought I was crazy. After working over nine years in the billing industry, I tend to nitpick all of the invoices that I receive. I noticed that on my CenturyTel invoice “directory assistance” had been misspelled. When I called in to report the problem, the CSR didn’t really believe me. He had asked me what I wanted them to do about it. I told them that it didn’t bug me too much, but since it’s probably appearing on other subscribers’ invoices, they may want to take care of it. Nearly a year later and they finally got it spelled correctly. At least the CSR at Sprint didn’t think I was insane. :)

Tagline for today: “All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store, with a pricing gun. She said, ‘Give me all of the money in the vault, or I’m marking down everything in the store.’” - Steven Wright