I Want My MTV (or You Only Call Twice)

Okay, not really. I hate MTV actually. But my satellite service is nonetheless a necessary evil, since my girlfriend is homebound without me. (Anyone want to donate a car? And hand-controls and some insurance money and - yeah, nevermind.)

I poked around the website for my bill. I'm looking for something around $60 or $70 amid the rest of the numbers, often including the previous month's debits and credits - maybe even $140 if two months got lumped together in the balance history. But I saw $223.

After I cleaned the Coke out of my keyboard, I fished around for the physical copies of the statements for the last two months. They hadn't yet molded to my desk. The statements each listed two plans, plus additional receiver fees, debit and credit history, taxes, and such. Wait - two plans?

Sure enough, there were both Plus and Pro plans on each statement. I called their 800 number and got a bossy young woman. "I need to know what plan you want." That was the problem, I told her. I never authorized any changes. I wanted her to undo any changes that were made to my account in recent months, and credit any associated fees, however she had to go about it. "I have to hear you say which plan you want."

No no no. I wanted the plan I had before someone made changes, period. She had records, and I insisted that she use them. She wasn't going to get me to try to clumsily identify a plan that I couldn't even be sure still existed anymore, now that they had changed things on my account. That's how they walk you into higher bills. The company had made a change, so she could unchange it or find someone with the right authority.

She was silent and I listened to call-center chit-chat in the background. I wasn't going to give up. I asked if she was making the changes. "Yeah." I waited perhaps ten more minutes. I asked if she was still with me, and she put me on hold without a word. I waited another three minutes, bombarded with chipper recordings about new services and how great the company was, before I killed the call and redialed.

I got a male the next time around, but he was rational. He explained that, a few months prior, someone had shut off the service and then immediately restarted it but had inadvertantly turned on settings for two different plans that offered only slightly different features, one being an upgrade of the other. He had no problem locating the original plan, turning off the wrong one, and crediting my account for the accumulated charges from the rogue plan.

When he was done, my bill for two months ended up being about $40 less than what I would have expected for that time frame, but I'm not complaining. It's the least they could have done, even if they wouldn't have done it intentionally. And I only had to call twice.

Me: 1
Satellite Company: 0