ET Don’t Call Home
11/18/2002
How can Phone companies get away with encrypting their bills? I know I am not the only person that has wasted time trying to figure out how the phone company determined how much money I owe them.
If you look at a typical credit card bill, you can at least follow the logic behind its layout. Phone companies have taken it upon themselves to overcomplicate this process by adding all sorts of surcharges, fees, taxes, and fine print. I tend to believe that most people just find the lines where it says “total due” and “due by” and are content with those two bits of information. For the most part I fall into the same category. It was not until my wife and I received a phone bill for over $190 that I was forced to interpret this foreign language.
I sorted out the bill into appropriate sections: local, long distance, wireless, and other and attempted to break it down logically. After doing some elementary math, I realized that I was paying more to call the next county than I was to call the Florida Keys from New York! That was all the interpretation I was prepared to do, I wanted to talk to someone from the phone company about this immediately.
After wading through the swamp of automated directory services, I finally got a real person on the phone. I will be the first to admit I was not in the best of moods when I made the call so some of my comments were abrupt, but I was not expecting sarcastic comments in return. After recomposing myself, I asked why my bill was three times what is was last month. After hearing an explanation I understood about a tenth of that I was told. I politely asked the representative to be patient, as I clarified some of the details she had explained to me. After more than a half hour on the phone (toll free I might add) I reached my learning capacity and hung up with approximately forty percent understanding of my bill.
To make a very long story short, we had switched our phone plan thinking it was going to be less expensive because of the advise of a representative from the previous month. I switched everything back to the way it was and now we can settle back into our routine of finding the “total due” and “due by”.
Phone companies think they are outsmarting us by saying their billing systems have become more simplified and user-friendly. This way the average person does not want to feel stupid when they call up to ask about the “simple” bill they received. If they truly made the bills easier to understand, maybe they would not need to hire as many customer service representatives and pay for as many toll free calls!
Why? Just Because!