Jesus H. motherfucking Christ, am I pissed. I canceled my Tmobile contract back in February, roughly the day my contract obligations ran out, because I wanted to get an iPhone and be on AT&T. I must have asked the woman who canceled my phone a dozen times if it was really, truly over, and she assured me that the phone would be shut down. My mistake was believing that it would be so simple, and throwing the beaten-up, barely surviving phone away. But since I had a) called ahead of time to warn them I was canceling and b) I was reassured a bunch of times that my contract would be canceled because I canceled it.
You can imagine my surprise to get a bill from Tmobile for $52 for a month of service that happened after it was canceled. Of course, it had no minutes on it, due to it being canceled. But there it was—-$52 about to be debited from my checking account for a phone I don’t use, because I fucking canceled it.
When shit like this happens, I get catatonic from cognitive dissonance. On one hand, I’m livid. There’s very little doubt that the phone companies have some sort of internal process to make sure to “forget” these sort of cancellations, knowing as they do that a certain percentage of customers will just keep paying the bill without noticing, because it’s an automatic debit. Due to this, some motherfucker deserves the wrath of a screaming, pissed off Texan. However, I’m also aware the the person assigned to absorb this wrath is a peon whose complicity in this dark system can be forgiven due to economic necessity. I do not enjoy yelling at relatively blameless customer service people who probably get drunk with their coworkers on Friday night and talk about how much they hate working there precisely because they’re told to “forget” to stop billing people and then they get yelled at for it. However, I was shaking from anger at this blatant sleaziness, so I was rather short with the poor woman who picked up the phone. Luckily for both of us, she knew immediately what was going on and shunted me directly to a manager. Who says he fixed the problem, but now I have to watch my stuff like a hawk to make absolutely sure, because god only knows what rules that poor guy is working under.
Is it possible that someone actually forgot to cancel my service? In the same sense that it’s possible that the pope forgets that condoms have been scientifically proven to stop the spread of HIV. The second I put my complaint on Twitter, a bunch of people on Twitter and Facebook said that the same thing happened to them or someone they know. At best, Tmobile (and other phone companies with the same problem) deliberately refuse to install software that automatically shuts down everything when a customer service rep cancels the service. But I wouldn’t put it past them to apply pressure to “forget” to cancel services, especially those with automatic debits.