Qwest charged me $85 for a service call that had to be made because my apartment manager failed to tell me that if I had any problems with getting a phone, I should talk to her first because the maintenance man would have to disengage my alarm for the phone to work. I had called Qwest's technical support, which is somewhere overseas, and the first report never even got to the Qwest support department here locally.
I then called back, talked to a different tech, who asked a few demeaning questions, like, "Is the phone plugged into the wall?", and he sent a tech — outside of the hours he set as the appointment; so I found a sign on my door when I got home saying he had missed me. I called again, and he sent someone out again, who was met by the apartment maintenance manager — and of course the problem was "solved."
The phone company told me I had to pay the $85, even though none of it was my fault. I told them I wasn't paying, and signed up with Vonage. One of the first things the Vonage customer rep said to me was, "I see you live in a building where there is an alarm system. You will need to have that disabled before we can hook you up." I explained that the action had already been taken. I contend that Qwest, somewhere, had that same information since the apartment complex has been around since the 1980's. I started to look around on the internet and found that Qwest's tech support in the Phillipines has no way to test a line, and does not have the same kind of access to information that techs here in the States have. If this is true, Qwest is just outright trying to rip me off.
Qwest sent the bill to Afni, and I disputed it again. The outfit basically told me nothing; mentioned nothing about the $85, and the woman I called after receiving the response gave me some fifth grade logic about how I could not make the "assumption" that Qwest had access to this information — even though they had been servicing the place for three decades. I wish I would have had the where-with-all to say, "And how can you assume that they do not?" Instead I got mad, told her I wasn't paying, and hung up.
I am sick and tired of paying money for services I don't ask for and things that are none of my doing, nor my responsibility. I'm sick of big companies, with their voicemail mazes and false fronts (When Qwest sells you a package, you deal with and American; when you have a problem, they send you to Southeast Asia) getting away with petty charges that add up to millions, maybe billions, each year. They can ruin my credit — I don't care.
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