cell phone saga, epilogue
I got my credit card bill today.
I\'ve been waiting for this one. I was expecting to see that Rogers gave me credit for the return of my phone and that it didn\'t charge me anything else. It did indeed credit me for the phone, but there was also a big, fat $103 debit.
Needless to say, I picked up the phone and called them. I was lucky this time, though. I only had to navigate a useless automated menu once, get put on hold three times and talk to two people.
I had less luck, though, if I was expecting any sort of redress. My account was only cancelled at the end of July. The $103 was me being billed for July even though I had no phone to use during that period. I have no idea where the $ 103 came from and I was too pissed off to ask. I thought my monthly bill came to about $60 after all the charges were laid on. But whatever.
My next credit card bill will show an extra $178 charge for early cancellation. It turns out that I used 750 kilobytes of data, which pushed me outside the 30day/30min/150kB trial period. That 750kB, by the way, constitutes visiting maybe three websites, a couple SSH sessions to see how that works and a bit of instant messaging. I had no way of finding out what my usage was in realtime. They only calculate it at billing (I know; I asked the rep to find out for me when I cancelled my account and he couldn\'t).
So, if you\'re keeping track, this means I will have spent $280 for absolutely nothing.
The obvious conclusion is that I will never be buying a cell phone again. Fucking ever. I will wait for cheap, ubiquitous WiFi or similar. I\'ll apologize in advance for the two or three times in a year where somebody might actually want to get ahold of me.