A Singular Complaint


Before I get into my main rant, I gotta say this. Speaking of television shows, in my previous blog, I got off the subway today to find that 24 was filming at Union Station! 24 season 4 is a complete mystery to everyone and it's very exciting to see that they are in full swing filming and stuff. I didn't actually see them filming. Actually, I think they had just finished because some guy was putting away wires and other equipment. There was a sign propped up announcing:

"You may be getting filmed. 20th Century Fox Television is filming the television series '24' at the moment and by being present, you give full consent that you may appear in our shots."

Now, that's not what the sign said verbatim, but it's pretty much the gist of it. In fact, I stopped reading the sign as soon as I read the numbers two and four in that second sentence. Then I looked around for any filming, but saw none. So if you're watching this upcoming season, they were possibly filming near the main lobby, next to the Surfliner check-in area (and subway exit). I'm all excited for the show to start again, even though it premieres in January 2005 and 99% of the original cast isn't returning.

Okay, now to my main event.

If you have Cingular Wireless, be cautious how you go about cancelling your plans when you're ready. My family had the family plan, naturally, and our contracts were up, so we wanted to switch to Verizon to get better signals in our areas. Well, back in July, it turns out that we got a bill late because we neglect to check the mail often and so we missed a due date. They shut off our service and required a $30 reactivation fee per line (we have 3). Mother Routes, not very happy about this, says "Okay, whatever. We were done with our contract anyway." So she gets Timotei to call and cancel our plan. They agree and we pay our final bill.

Well, the next week or so, we got another bill from Cingular, so we called them asking about it. They told us that there was a mandatory "30-day notice" rule for cancelling plans. It's hidden in the small print. So my mom was FURIOUS. They didn't alert us to this and so we thought our phones were disconnected. Meanwhile we were getting charged for the next month without using it.

So we waited the 30 days very angrily and then recently got new phones from Verizon. While I was transferring my phone numbers from my old phone to my new phone, I noticed that I still had the little "Cingular" logo on my phone. So when Timotei called about it today, they said that we only requested to cancel one of the phone lines. WE WERE GETTING CHARGED FOR THE OTHER TWO!!! That was BULL SHMOKE!

So my brother asked if we had to pay for it and they said yes. So we requested to speak with a supervisor who very nicely told us that they, as a business center, are required to tell customers who are cancelling, that they have to cancel each line separately. We were never told this. So they backdated our fees to the cancellation date of the cancelled line and we are finally out of Cingular's grasp.

Those idiots. I swear. They trap you and take your money. Good for nothing Republicans.

(If you take offense to that because Republicans have nothing to do with this story, kiss off.)

So beware of Cingular. If you thought only their signals and dead zones sucked, think again. Here's hoping Verizon treats us a little better (they don't have the 30-day notice policy).



Happy with my new slider phone,

Ricky
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