on life & other inconveniences

For two years, Brian and I had our cell plans with T-Mobile. The plan we were on doesn’t exist anymore, but we paid upfront for our service every month, such as it was. The phones were cheap and mine routinely froze. Of course, T-Mobile didn’t care. The coverage was spotty, with frequent drops, and when we moved house the coverage was practically non-existent. I always found it rather odd that I could receive voicemails and text messages when I couldn’t call out or send a text message to save my life.

But all of that is rather minor to my complaint with them now. Our two-year plan was up, and after getting nowhere with any valid issues we did have with the phones/service, I wasn’t sad to move to another company. I now have cell coverage throughout the whole house - yeah! - and am already addicted to my Blackberry.

So, I’ve moved elsewhere. Why still be pissed at T-Mobile?

Well, remember I said that we paid at the beginning of the month for our service? Complicated as it was, we started our plan on March 16. Our re-up date with the phone starting our new monthly minutes was the 20th. But the payment for the upcoming month was debited from my bank on the 13th. We have to wait until the 16th to cancel our plan, which means we’ve already paid for the next month. There were certain advantages to that. We never had to worry about random, unexpected charges, for one thing, but when canceling it’s a bit of a pain. Okay, it’s annoying, but a phone call should correct that and we’ll get our money back… right?

Nope. We’ve been informed that we have to wait 60 days to call them and get our money back. Now, imagine you bought a DS from WalMart and it didn’t work and you went back and gave it to them and then they said, “Okay, in 60 days come ask for your money.” You’d flip out. Why the hell should you have to wait to get your money back?

I can appreciate it might take a week, ten days, to process the request… but 60 days before you can even ask? That’s a total load of BS.

I’m fed up with companies that walk all over their clients, that have completely unfair business practices and shit service to begin with. Sure, someone who works for T-Mobile is probably going to vow to never read my books now, but I don’t care. You buy my book, don’t like it, you can return it and get your money back the same day. That’s fair. T-Mobile is beyond ludicrous and I’m sure the reason for the policy is the hope that people will forget and never get their money back.

And that’s as shady as it gets.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 8:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.