We now are land lined....

After a year of fighting with the phone company they finally sent a guy out to check our complaints about our cell phone service. It's a long sad story but the long and short of it (well basiclly just the long) is that a little over a year ago we had two cell phones that we signed up on a three year contract for and a land line. We decided to cancel one of the cell phones but Aliant in their infinite wisdom told us that in order to do that we would have to pay out the cell phone contract which was $20 dollars a month for three years each phone .. hmmm.. 36x20=$720.0x2phones.. I don't think so Tim!!!...

So we said "screw you" and disconnected our land line.. leaving us with two cell phones... which would have been fine except for the fact that we live in the Burmuda Triangle of cell phone hell... a call can start off at a good signal and almost immediately drop off the map and you would hear the dreaded bleep blida bleep of a dropped call.. So instead of "screw you" it was "screw us" and we spent a year of complaining and being told we signed a contract so we suffered and moaned and basically became cut off from the outside world when we were at home.. our families stopped calling because they couldn't maintain a call for more than a couple of minutes at the most.... we never made any calls to any businesses from home... and heaven forbid if we had an emergency and had to call 911 (who's cost of service is added to our bill each month)..

The straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was last week when we tried to call Aliant about a mistake on our bill.. you know when you phone those places that you have to go through the dreaded automated system where you have to press "1" for this and the "#" key for that.. well they don't have a "I'm going to take this fucking phone and ram it up your arse if it drops one more call" key... so I fumed and cursed and called back again and again.. until in frustration I called them on Skype (that wonderful phone system where you can phone out from your computer to a land line for next to nothing a year but don't have the system in Canada yet where you can receive calls and get your own Skype phone number)...

Anyway, back to my story, I got ahold of them on Skype to straighten the bill out and said at the end of the call that I wanted to make a complaint about our cell phone service and explained my frustration about the numberous dropped calls that evening (leaving out the arse ramming scenerio if you're wondering). They passed me along to their service people who took my information and passed it along to the other service people and asked what number they could call for more information if needed... I told them it's no use calling on the cell phone and the Skype can only call out, so I said to email me and proceeded to give them my email address..

Sure enough, a couple of days later I got an email asking for particulars: our civic address, time of day of dropped calls *like all day every day*, etc... I emailed them back all the info and they emailed back saying they would call me or in my case email me when a service man would be in our area... I emailed back saying "I hope you see the irony of the fact that you have to email me".. A few days later a guy did come out and confirmed our problem and gave us the name of yet another guy would took the complaints and said to tell him that he checked out the service in our area and it is minimal to nill and I thought "hmmmm... smells like a buck passing mission to me"..

But I did as I was told and lo and behold on Friday I got a call on my cell phone from the last guy on the list who is the head honcho for the cellular servic on PEI and he had an offer we couldn't refuse.. he allowed us to disconnect one cell phone with no penalty and would reimburse us back to the first of the year and would hook up our land line with no activation fee.. but the real funny part is while he was expaining all they would do for us, the phone kept dropping the calls.. I was laught myself silly as he called back and called back trying to apologise and grovel and saying he is experiencing our frustration first hand.. ha.. you don't know the half of it baby...

just a little side note.. I emailed him the next day and asked him if the first of the year he's reimbursing me for is the first of this year or the first of last year.. I'm leaning towards a reply of the first of this year but it doesn't hurt to ask eh...