Bell Canada

About a month or two ago, when moving my studio to my basement I had to discontinue my internet from bell canada. Of course you would think it would be a pretty simple task which could go like this:

Me: Hello bell canada representitive. I need to cancel my internet because my business is closing at the end of the month.

B.C: Not a problem Mr.Robb, we'll bill you till the end of the month and send a box for the modem after that. Is that everything? Have a nice day!

But alas, customer service is not on bell's prime objective summery. On my first phone call, I was told that I couldn't cancel because I was signed up on a 5 year contract that started last december when (and I do remember this), a bell sales person called me up and asked if I wanted to upgrade my account to a wireless modem (which never worked because bell doesn't understand that people use MAC computers...). I did verbally agree to this, since I had no current plans to move at that time, but mind you I signed no contract. Needless I hung up with the rep, knowing that I needed to look back into my bills before to get more info.

A week later I called again, going through their automated phone services, and got to talk to a very nice rep who I could not understand what she was saying for the life of me. I explained my situation and what was going on and after being on the phone for just over 10 minutes, and asking her to repeat everything she said at least twice, I hung up in frusteration again when she kept saying that I can't cancel. She did give me another phone number to call to talk to another service rep that may help better. Calling this new number brought me through another set of automated messages (which by the way you don't have to deal with if you just keep pushing 0 as fast as you can!), and I started talking to another lady who spoke slightly better english. Explaining my problem, and the steps i've been through already, she looked into my account and after talking to her manager told me that I could get out of the contract (woo hoo!), but only after paying for 1/2 the time left which equaled about $3400 (not so woo hoo...). I then got my dad involved (he can talk people out of anything), and it was only after he called and had to ask the service rep to repeat herself 5 times that he asked where she was located. Turns out that India is the headquarters for bell CANADA. Great to see a canadian company keeping the jobs here. My dad did finally get a number for a rep here in canada and after only 3 calls to him and an email to the president of customer service for bell did we finally get a call saying that the charges have been taken off and we are free to stop the service.

So quite a relief after being told I had to pay $3000+ just to not use their internet any more. So all was happy.

Then a week later I recieved two new modems in the mail (on the same day). The same modems they tried to get me to use before but don't work with mac computers. (Oh and a side note, according to their tech reps, no one at bell knows how to use mac computers, they're not trained on them at all. You can tell who keeps up with the changing economy of technology!)

Finally today, after a month of waiting for bell to send a box(which they never did) to return the modem that they most likely would try to charge me for, I physically returned ALL the modems to a bell store (no more automated service for me).

So kids, the moral of this story: don't use bell for anything. if you want to work for bell, all the best, but at this rate they'll be going under soon (one can hope).