Getting anything but a higher bill out of companies like Rogers is often times an exercise in futility. But for a guy in Edmonton, that was only half his problem. The other half was not actually signing up for some of what Rogers had decided to bill him for.
Andy Pearcy is probably like most people. You’ve got 80 million things on the go, so when the end of the month rolls around, you take 20 minutes or so, stare at your bills long enough to figure out what the final number is, then fire that final number in the required direction so you can move on with your day and they can’t call you about it tomorrow. The problem if you’re Andy, though, is $10 of that final number was going to a fortune teller he didn’t sign up for. In exchange for the money he didn’t know he was paying, they sent him occasional text messages he thought were your run-of-the-mill spam you just shrug off, delete and forget about in 5 minutes–since, you know, he didn’t sign up for the things.
Naturally, when he found out, he called rogers. Naturally, because rogers, they said he ought to call the guys sending him the text messages–because Rogers and refund are mutually exclusive terms, you know. And naturally, Andy had no interest in asking a company he didn’t sign up with who wasn’t doing the actual billing to stop taking his money. The rest, as they say, is pretty business as usual. I’m no expert here or anything, but I’m thinking perhaps if Rogers had done a little fortune asking of its own, it could have quite possibly avoided a headache. But then, Rogers not asking questions might be a small contributing factor to its picking up half the bill for itself. Yeah, I see a not very smart executive promotion in somebody’s near to immediate future.