As if I needed one more reason to hate Rogers!
As if their outrageous system access fees and astronomical $8 caller ID charges wasn’t enough. Rogers was clever enough to come up with yet another reason to hate them.
I originally bought an iPhone on July 12, 2008 with a three year term. At the time the plan was $60 (plus the multitude of miscellaneous rip-off charges) for a lousy 150 daytime (where daytime in Rogers’ world ends at 9 PM, not 6 PM) minutes and a humble 400 MB of data transfer. I accepted these lousy terms, cause well, I’m Canadian. Our cellphone industry is a joke and I wanted an iPhone. What else can I say?
Moving on, a few months later I discovered they are now advertising 1 GB of data and 250 minutes and the addition of “my five” for the same price I signed up for initially. Of course Rogers would never move a client to an improved plan. They’d prefer to happily charge you extra for all your minutes, again at astronomical rates. I was quick to notice their upgraded package (I watch them like a hawk, I don’t trust the bastards). I immediately called up and requested an upgrade from the $60 iPhone plan to the $60 iPhone plan. This was November 23, 2008. All was well.
Now for today… As part of my “can’t trust the bastards so I must keep constant surveillance on them” routine, I logged into their on-line billing system and browsed my account for oddities. There I found something that wasn’t there before. Right next to the usual “iPhone Data Access 1 GB” was a new line of blue text that read “term expires on 23/11/2011”. Um, excuse me? What does that mean?!
I called them up and after a 20 minute hold time confirmed the worst of my suspicions, they extended my contract by several months when I changed my package. Perhaps they’re hoping nobody will notice this shenanigans?
Contrary to what I’ve been told, the friendly Rogers rep proceeded to tell me that all data plans have a three year commit… Um? Really. That’s odd. The story I’ve always heard from Rogers (aka Robbers) is I can upgrade my plan at any time with no penalties and could downgrade my plan at any time, incurring a downgrade fee. Never have I heard such non-sense of extending a contract upon changing plans.
After putting me on hold for another several minutes, the rep informed me she could backdate the term to August 25, 2011, allegedly the computer simply “wouldn’t let her” backdate it any further. This is only a month and some longer than what my term was supposed to be, but I backed down at this point. It’s close enough… After-all, if I didn’t want to be ripped off, I wouldn’t be a Rogers client to begin with! Clearly I must accept the occasional unexpected rape in exchange for their services, no?
November 24th, 2009 at 6:16 am
That is pretty crappy. Could you get a phone in the US and use it in Canada? Just curious if that would be cheaper…