Warning: Language. I am tired, having been on the phone with Rogers for a long time and three people. I am irritated, having had no success. AGAIN. So if you don’t like rough language, then skip this post. Thanks so much.
… more ridiculous. That’s the end of the title.
I am stunned. I got an email from Rogers today that suggested that they could call me and help me upgrade my plan so I could get the new phone. Um … no kidding. I could help me upgrade too if all I wanted to do was piss away more cash. Good grief, the problem is that I was to find a reasonable solution to these costs while still getting decent features and service. All anyone wants to do at Rogers is spend my money …
I got a second email from the fellow that the first fellow said was going to call me. He told me to email back if I was interested. Hmmm … why not just call in myself, I thought?
So I called this evening. Having spent last night on a half dozen spread sheets with alternatives, I had settled on a plan that would chop more than $100 from my overall bill and retain all the things we valued, while jettisoning the things we do not value.
Today I called only about wireless, but let me first cover the other services.
Internet
This will stay at $99.99 Ultimate service. 250GB cap, 75Mbps down, 2Mbps up. Very nice service overall, performance is good except in the evening, when things bog down badly. Typical of cable systems where so many people share a segment.
I will not do anything that could get me under contract because I plan to check every quarter to see if we can get Fibe 50/50 service here. Same cap. Slightly lower download rates, vastly higher upload rates. Opens the possibility of doing cloud backups etc. And it is 20 bucks cheaper.
Home Phone
Bye bye. I almost never use it, and the only people who call us are telemarketers, notably the evil air duct cleaning companies. If it were 20 bucks, I’d keep it in a heart beat. But Rogers insists on charging me 50 bucks a month for some unfathomable reason.
TV
I want to reduce this. But as I documented in my last rant, I want to avoid losing HBO, Sportsnet One, and TSN2HD. We watch sports now and again and I really like HBO. See the last rant for reasons why Rogers has arranged these channels to pull many other packages and force people up to 100 bucks. It’s a rip off, but what isn’t in the Canadian media services market?
Besides … I am waiting for Fibe TV to come to my neighborhood. That service looks awesome.
Wireless
And now … on with today’s show.
The first person I chat with seems to want to argue every point with me. Really annoying. But eventually I get her to understand that I want the $45 voice and data plan in order to modernize my plans and thus allow me to upgrade to the latest generation of phones. Turns out that $45 is not enough because it contains only a 100MB data plan. This is apparently not enough revenue for Rogers to subsidize the modern phones, even though they allowed me to get the first iPhone with no data plan at all.
But, as with all things, corporate entities must grow and the way to do that is to force customers to reach for a higher bar. Nowadays they want you spending 30 bucks on data alone if they can get you there.
Eventually she realizes that all my wireless numbers have corporate codes on them as I got them when I joined my current company back in 2003. Thus, she cannot touch them anyway. Sheesh.
Person 2 – The Business Unit
This was a very personable young woman who really knows her stuff. We went through the whole thing again, with me alternating between telling her what I want and me ranting. She took that very well and had no problem agreeing with many of my points, since they are all perfectly true.
At one point she mentions that my monthly commitment to Rogers is higher than her car payment. No surprise … since it is almost double mine as well (and my Mazda 3 is only a year old.)
So … we spend a long time laying out the goals I want to achieve and she says she fully understands. She decides that she will call customer relations and explain everything to them, thus saving me the pain of explaining it all a third time. She feels confident that a long time customer (1987) like me with a commitment this huge should be able to upgrade his phone for a reasonable plan cost.
I had been listening to silence while she was talking to customer relations, and suddenly I hear a burst of background music for a second, then a ringback. A fellow answers and asks for my name. I give it and he asks “how can I help you?”
Oh oh … this is not what was supposed to happen.
So I ask “are you customer relations?”
“Yes”
I say “I was just speaking with several people and the last one said she would call customer relations and discuss my situation and then transfer me.”
“She transferred you cold.”
I say “It’s been at least 10 minutes … did she speak with you at all?”
“No. How can I help you?”
I’m thinking … “you could go fuck yourself, for starters.”
But instead I say something like “I’ve been on the phone with Rogers for a long time and am too tired to go through this all over again. I‘ll have to call back.”
So … mark II ends as did mark I. Fuck!
So … it will cost me $200 to cancel my youngest’s phone. It will probably cost me something to drop the TV service, but not much since my commitment ends in September.
I’ll bet I can get the cancellation fees back pretty quickly with Bell, at least in free stuff like the free PVR they are offering.
So now what? Do I have to keep taking this shit?
