Tuesday, December 15, 2009

ISP Mystery Thickens

A while back, I was here complaining about my internet service provider.

As is the case with most Weird Tales of customer service, what appears on the surface isn't really the reality. So here's what happened. And I must give credit where credit is due, we found all this out after Michelle called them and asked the questions; she's much more aggressive about finding out this kind of stuff than I am.

First, a little background. Our ISP suddenly goosed our internet service up $10 a month. We got some shrugs from one guy, a "your promotion expired" response from another guy, but no real explanation of what really happened until Michelle called them yesterday, out of frustration because I didn't want to.

And frankly, the guy she talked with isn't quite sure how it happened, but this is what did happen: We were on a promotional program that was meant to give us service for $25 a month for the first six months, then step us up to the $30 a month we were suddenly charged starting two months ago. A glitch in the system, however, caused our price to step down by $5 a month to $20, a price which we enjoyed for a year. Now, when the bills came, we never paid much attention  to them utnil, of course, the price went up to $30 a month. Nobody seems to know why this happened.

So we got a slightly better promotional rate of $29 a month -- not much of a discount from the $30 they were charging, but we get three months free on a two-year contract. Just an odd little situation. I'm hoping by the time we renew that prices will have gone down. But I'm not holding my breath.

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