Saying Good Riddance to Verizon

I’m going to wean myself off my cell phone.

My latest Verizon bill is over $600 because I had a $200 minutes overage last month.  I followed their prompt to “upgrade today and avoid paying for your minute overage” and upgraded my account from the cheapest plan to unlimited minutes.

When it came time to pay my bill I nearly keeled over to see that I had a $500 bill.  In shock, I made a hurried call to Verizon.  Turns out that when you “upgrade today to avoid paying for your minute overage” what they mean is from that day going forward.  It no longer acts retroactively.

In addition, it prorated all the days I went over at my new, more expensive plan rates.  All taxes and fees are charged at my new premium plan rates.  So by upgrading at the prompt all I really achieved was to pay much more than the original $200 overage fee.

I called Verizon three times over this.  The last call lasted two hours and I was assured that they were going to credit me the charges due to all this bringing my bill back down to the original $200 or so.  Today when I logged in to pay I found a $600 bill waiting for me.  Verizon also sent me an email cordially informing me that my phones will be turned off if I don’t pay.  I’ve been with Verizon for around 8 years and have never missed a payment.

Since we came back to the states and returned to Verizon I’ve had nothing but problems.  I’ve been sold a two year old model phone for $70 that turned out to be broken.  I traded it in for the same older model phone only to find out that one had been wet and was also broken.  I had to pay for insurance to get it replaced… and the replacement didn’t work either.  A final try got me the same old model phone and it still has minor issues.

I was willing to put up with the broken phones.  I was willing to put up with having to call every month since I’ve rejoined to fix something in my account.  What I can’t do is pay $600 because I upgraded my plan.  I will be sending an email to cordially inform Verizon that they may turn my phones off and have them back.  I don’t think I’ve ever missed paying anything, but I simply don’t have it in this case.

Thanks to the timely gift from my daughter of the iPad I’ll be using Skype instead.  For less than $15 a month I now have unlimited international calling and a new phone number… turning Verizon’s greedy charges into a blessing in disguise.  Thanks Verizon!

No more mobiles for me.