Bleh

It's been a while since I was able to blog, get online, or do much of, well, anything. This is entirely due to a certain company I mentioned before as having very poor customer service.

After the house fire we had back in November, I asked this company to suspend our service, and told them why. They said they would - I received no bills, and got the occasional person telling me that our home phone number had been disconnected. I thought nothing further of it.

So imagine our suprise, and Red's fury, when four days after we moved back in, we discovered in the mail a phone bill saying our service was disconnected as of the beginning of January, for non payment of the $300 phone bill from November to current. I was livid - we spent three hours on the phone with these people, and finally extracted from them a promise to do something unspecified right away if we'd have the fire marshal fax them a copy of the report on the fire.

Fine, whatever. So we asked the fire marshal to do that, and he did.

A week went by. Then another week.

I finally had had enough, and last Thursday I had some time, so I called and was what I call polite and Red calls being diplomatic in an evil sense. By the time I was done talking to them, they'd decided to just make the whole bill problem go away. They said they'd waive the entire bill, set us up with a new connection. Then I decided, well, if we're feeling all try-to-keep-the-customer-happy here, let's see how far it'll go.

"So will you take the same package you had before?" the lady asked.
"No, I don't think so, actually," I said. "See, I've had an offer from one of your competitors....they're offering to give me faster broadband for six months, for less than I'd be paying for two months of services with you. Just under $300 for six months, in fact. Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn't switch, because I've got to tell you, between the economy and the problems I've had with your company over the last six months, I'm inclined to. I have no brand loyalty here."
"How about we give you three months at $18 and $46.99 per month forever, with a faster tiered speed than you had before?"
"Tell me more."

I ended up getting a new modem, faster service, and since we didn't opt for the $80 in extra phone package stuff since we're going to go with T-Mobile's VoIP service (for $10 a month), that's all I'll be paying. In short, I got a free new modem, free new router, and a faster connection for about half what I was paying before.