Thursday, March 03, 2005

Gone two days; first day back...

A busy day. Two and a half days away from the office and you'd think I'd been gone a month. The email queue had 32 new messages, many of which had to be answered or requested some kine of action. Due to my foresight in putting a message on my phone telling callers I would next be in the office on Thursday, there were few voice messages waiting. But that relief was more than overcome by the stack in my in box (paper stuf).

AND, near the top of that pile was last month's bill from Verizon. This one covered the period of our long distance outage (see the postings from Feb. concerning my fight with the telephone company). The bill sported a new account number, which frightens me when I wonder what happened to the charges from the OLD account. Are they "in there" somewhere? Or will they surface later. Wait... Come to think of it we should have had a CREDIT to the old account, and I KNOW that wasn't in there.

But it gets better. There were some charges from AT&T long distance at exhorbitant rates per minute, but there were also calls billed under Verizon Long Distance which exceeded my guarantee of 5.5 cents per minute, 24/7.

Then, as I examined some other pages, it looks like they were billing us for some lines we no longer have. Oh, this is going to be fun!

At least I have the phone number and email address of the manager I dealt with last month. She told me to send her a copy of my next bill and they would re-rate (downward) all the AT&T charges that were only incurred because Verizon was unable to turn on themselves as my long distance provider. I think I'll just send the entire bill to her and let her re-work it before I pay anything.

Of course, if I do that they'll probably cut off our phone service entirely since no department in that company seems to know what any other department is doing.

Several things are coming to a head at once, it seems. One week from today is my daughter's unemployment appeal hearing. I'll bring you up to date on my plans for that soon.

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