Company: AT & T
Roar Rating: 3.7 roars.
Scale: Fire-->5 roars-->4 roars-->3 roars-->2 roars-->1 roar-->1 purr-->2 purrs-->3 purrs-->4 purrs-->5 purrs
(Fire is so awful you should run away gibbering. 5 roars is as bad as it gets, don't even bother with the product or service. 5 purrs is so good you should drop what you're doing and run and get whatever I'm talking about.)
Phone bills. The phone bill. We all get a phone bill. I remember when our bill came with a actual punch card - an IBM tabulator card, thank you Dr. Hollerith! - and no one questioned its tabulated amount. Who, in America, keeps a wary eye on their minutes of phone use or who they called last month? Why, our friend the phone company does, of course! That's why they have the Big Interesting computers, which when they're not connecting your call, they are busily billing your call.
In fact, we have a tacit understanding with our service providers and our utilitiy services. They meter our use of their services, and we are charged for what we use. We don't meter our services, becuase we can't. They have the technology and we pay for it, and all is fair and good and we get to chat with Aunt Polly and Cousin Derf, and faraway lands like Nebraska and Cleveland, whenever we want.
Now, I have been a big fan of phone companies, and have always had an immense respect for the problem they solved - instant communication over far distances at the will and the whim of the consumer. Wow! I mean, I didn't invent a device to transmute my voice magically (ok, electronically) over the miles to my friends and family, I didn't invest in its discovery, I didn't run copper wires hither and yon all over the planet, I didn't create the switches and computers, the multiplexers and early masts and cables, the topology of the wires and the error correction methodology - the phone company did! Telephones are, simply, a miracle of technology, a magical network for use in our real-life, an amazing human acheivement, priced so all can partake.
Then shit happened.
For as long as I can remember, which is indeed long, our monthly phone bills have been evolving, an increasingly complex moraine of funky fees, additional taxes, regulatory charges, and complex regional billing schemes.
It's far too simple to charge you for the use of the services you consume, oh no. That would just be normal capitalism, and as we all are (or should be) learning, normal capitalism is not the best way for corporations to make money in this, our Brave New World. Not at all. Due to corporate empowerment by poorly or blatantly unfairly crafted government rules, laws and regulations, now the best way to make money has become a combination of legally bullying the consumer, plus crony-capitalisim, which is another way of saying, the government is in cahoots with the telecommuncation industry and allows all sorts of odd, non-intuitive charges to be assesed from us, the hapless consumers.
And most insidious, most alarming, most evilly subtle - is the overbill. The seemingly erratic, some-customers-get-walloped-some-of-the-time, always illogical, overbill.
You may not even notice. Or you notice after months. Or it's a seemingly one-off charge for roaming when you didn't roam, or didn't know you were roaming. Or it's such a small amout you can't be bothered to call in and wait on hold for 2 hours for customer service. Or you already called and you thought they applied the credit but they didn't. Or you see you've been paying for a feature you never ordered - for the past 2 years - and you can't get a back-credit. Plus after the feature is removed, it comes back.
This list goes on and on. Services are only offered bundled, with a myriad of choices, and the bundles almost always give you some feature you don't want. Even though it would be possible, even simple, for each individual to order exactly what service they want, that combination of what you actually want is usually simply not available.
Telephone service has metastized from being a service you pay for when you need it to a cryptic maze of choices and services, fees and regulations, a veritable feast on your pocketbook by the Company itself, which has left you no tools to defend said pocketbook due to their practice of complexifying and systematically making their billing and their services impossible to manage.
The column in this past weekend's NY Times which I posted yesterday left me annoyed and angry with AT & T, (and, stating the obvious here, with all the major service providers, which to various extents, have the same practices in place). I too have had huge billing errors which took hours to correct, and which I then found over the following month(s) had to be corrected over and over. I too have received the sweet, polite apologies: "I am so sorry, Ms. Roars. Of course that never should have happened. I, and the Phone Company, love you, and will make everything better right away. Because I am so very, very sorry".
Ha.
In fact, there are even companies which make their business correcting consumer's phone bills. In NYC, Tele-Transitions Organization has as their sole business the correcting of phone bill fees for their customers. And they've been in business over 25 years.
I don't think the question is if any phone company is really participating in what amounts to predatory consumer practices. We need to wise up and accept that they are doing it. In fact they are perfecting doing it. By evolving a complex combination of inconveniently bundled services, training a toothless but polite customer-service army, putting in place practices that insure it will take most customers many minutes or hours on average to correct errors, billing or otherwise. And their success in this complexification depends on our trust, and our lack of time to figure out our bill or wait on hold for customer service.
And after all, it's the phone company! What are you going to do, not have a phone? Nonsense!! And nota bene, if you will - all major phone companies have similar billing practices, the same government fees, similar cryptic bundles of services. (It bore repeating).
The problem, however, is not the phone company itself, not any of them. It's the powerful symbiotic relationship that has formed over the past decades between consumers, corporations, and regulators. It's SEC regulations being passed that empower, in this case, the communications companies, coupled with the design of increasingly poor customer service complete with handy, intimidating, technical goobeldy-gook:
Y: I got billed 1 million dollars for roaming and I turned roaming off. Please fix my bill.
P: There was a spinning triangular icon in the uppermost millimeter of your screen to indicate your phone was roaming. You must have seen it.
Y: I didn't. And anyway, I turned off roaming on my phone. And I called you to tell you that I don't want any roaming allowed on my device.
P: We can't control how your phone roams. That's what the icon is for. You must pay. We are so sorry!!!
Y: Bye-bye, money!
Or:
Y: I didn't make 10,003 calls to Slovenia this month. Or ever.
P: Our billing computer says you did. You must pay.
Y: But I don't know any one in Slovenia, although I'm sure they are all very nice.
P: Our technician tested your line for hyperintegrity and they found a 30% voltage drop during the time of your calls which indicates you in fact did call Slovenia. We are so sorry that you didn't realize you called Slovenia.
Y: Bye-bye, money!
If you don't want to keep saying bye, bye money, then here is your task. Our task. The problem itself. The very core of our consumer existence, you and me. This concerted, studied finanicial fleecing of the customer is happening. By phone companies and, if you reflect, you will realize this is also applicable to your - our - interactions with many, many large corporations nowadays. The corporations know it, they are engineering it. They are learning to become better and better at it, and are practicing on us. We are paying more and more for less and poorer services. The path to this has been subtle but effective. We have come to accept slow, poor customer service, a polite apology, paying a little more. Errors that take more and more of our time to correct are let go. We no longer expect all the items on many of our billing statements to make sense to us. At bottom, most of us believe these errors are just that - errors. That this won't get too bad, that it's not really dangerous, that others will complain and fix it and if they don't, maybe that means it's ok.
For this situation to improve, we need to act. It is every individual's repsonsibilty to stand up to these corporations, to let them know where the line is. If you're unhappy with something, make sure you understand why. Are your reasons valid and clear? Then act. Complain. Write letters. Request and then demand to understand your billing statements, and question every line. A new tax? Why? A new regulatiory fee? What for? Talk about it to your friends. Consider switching providers or even cancelling your services briefly if your problems remain unresolved. Tell customer service people when you think something is predatory, illogical, unfair or unclear about your bill - even if they can't respond to you they can hear you. They are people and they can hear you.
Make a clatter.
Please make a clatter. Let's get some sense and balance back into the marketplace before we forget what's fair, and how to use our voices at all.
