David Frey's Waste of Tubes
GoesToEleven.org
The idiocy of Telus
June 13, 2004 - Tagged as: Rants
I have a cell phone now. Not because I really wanted one, but because it was a better idea than paying to get a land line hooked up while I was in Richmond for four months. I have had it for a few months now and everything has been fine.
Yesterday I opened up my cell phone bill and I noticed that I had been charged for incoming messages. I was pretty sure that I wasn't supposed to be charged for this, so I checked my previous bill. Sure enough, I hadn't been charged anything for the 15 incoming text messages the month before.
I called Telus up and after navigating through their stupid prompts I was allowed to talk to someone. I told him what happened, he was confused and did a check to see if he could figure out what happened. After a few minutes he came back and said that he would refund my 90 cents. I'm not too happy about having to spend 10 minutes on the phone with them to fix their accounting problems, so I began to explain what happened so that they could prevent this from happening again.
The first rule of Telus tech support club is you must hold the user accountable for all problems your don't understand. The second rule of Telus tech support is that you must say stupid shit to try and make the customer think you know what you are talking about.
I explained to the guy how I had written a program to filter my incoming e-mail and then forward shortened versions of the e-mail to [my-phone-number]@msg.telus.com if the sender was in a list of people I wanted to receive text messages from. He saw his route out! Anyone who isn't using Microsoft Outlook for all things relating to e-mail surely doesn't deserve correct accounting. He told me how my program was probably causing the problem and that I should just use Microsoft Outlook. I tried to explain to him how it shouldn't matter which client is sending the mail since it is just a standard SMTP message, but he would have none of this logic stuff I was trying to dope him with. He suggested that I probably needed to upgrade something on my system. You know, "it's a 4.0 thing or something". I don't recall exactly what he said, but it was something approximately that stupid.
Now I want you to think about this for a minute. They give you free incoming text messaging because people would complain bitterly if they received spam on their [phone-number]@msg.telus.com number and got charged for it. It would seem that I have developed some sort of e-mail forwarding program that infiltrates their servers and puts a charge on the receiving person's account. Does that sound like bullshit to you? Is it not more plausible that Telus has just screwed up my account? If you answered "yes" then you obviously don't work for Telus.
I'll wrap up now. I gave up and requested that he get the systems people (who may know what they are talking about), to give me a call. I'm sure this won't happen and I'll just have to call up and get my bill fixed again next month.