Here’s why T-mobile are a bunch of assholes

So, going on one year I’ve had T-mobile as my cellphone provider. I am rather “meh” about them overall. Their voice quality is shitty, but I rarely talk on my phone, so that’s not such a big deal. I am thoroughly sick of my myTouch, and want to hurl it down the toilet, but there’s nothing in T-mobile’s lineup with which I want to replace it, and I do not know that I want to extend my contract with them anyway, so I am stuck with it for another year. Its stupid on-screen keypad and attendant typo-storms= bleh, its tendency to non-responsiveness in times of immediate need= double-bleh. Its stupid non-standard headphone jack that I have to carry an adapter for at all times (replaced on later models) and its dumbass super-old Android OS which T-mobile has made NO attempt to upgrade… its horrible useless camera… did I mention the totally out of date OS they refuse to fucking update, so I do not have access to all the cool Android apps developed in the last year? Well, lets just say I am fucking sick of it.

But that’s not even why they’re assholes. Here’s why they’re assholes. Their asshole website “MY TMOBILE HOLYSHIT OMFG ITS ALL ABOUT ME!” and online payment center. They are such fucking assholes that they refuse to store my payment method from month to month UNLESS I agree to auto-pay. Now, most of my bills are auto-pay and I prefer it that way. Electric, gas, water, sewer, they all just magically deduct from my account each month and I don’t have to think about it, and that’s nice. However some bills, mortgage and telephone bills especially, I want to pay myself. That’s because telecoms have a way of suddenly charging you some weird amount with no warning. My AT&T (home phone and internet) bill is NEVER the same month to month. And my T-Mobile bill has gone up by $.40 every few months since I’ve had the phone. (Bill amounts have been: $90.65, $91.05, $91.55, $91.78 and now $92.01) Why? Who fucking knows, it’s a fucking mystery. Is the extra $1.36 breaking my budget? No it’s not. But it does tell me that I should pay attention to my bills and what’s on them.

SO ANYWAY I pay my bills on time. Actually, another reason that I like to not have auto-pay is that I pay my T-mobile bill really far in advance, because that works out better for me in terms of budgeting. The week that it’s due is the week a lot of other bills are also due, so I tend to pay it two or three weeks in advance of when it’s due. You’d think they’d appreciate a nice, bill-paying customer like me, right? But no, they don’t. Because I will not submit to their auto-pay tyranny, they refuse to store my payment info. Not my bank account number, not my cc info, nothing. They do this to make it awkward for their non-auto-pay customers. Not only do I have to re-enter my info every month (using multiple screens, and typing in a whole bunch of data they could easily store. Like seriously, the system doesn’t even auto-propagate my NAME. Here on MY T-FUCKING-MOBILE they have trouble remembering who the fuck I am, apparently.) I also have to re-accept some kind of “one-time only payment terms and conditions” screen. Every fucking month.

This is a pain in the ass for me, as my credit card is usually in my purse (downstairs) when I am upstairs in my office at bill-paying time. Since I switched to Chrome and lost google toolbar, I can’t even store my CC info there, and something in me cringes at having it just saved as a text file, easy to access on my computer. I guess I could do that. But that’s not the POINT. The point is not that I should be able to come up with some workaround for their assholery. The point is that their practice is unfriendly to their customers, and they’re trying to hassle me enough and make my experience with their company’s website so shitty that I finally give up and give them at-will access to my bank account. Which I will not do.  Hassling your customers into doing things only the way you want them to is NOT the way to engender brand loyalty, you stupid fucks. And every other website I deal with STORES MY PAYMENT INFO IF I WANT THEM TO.

I am sure some genius at T-Mobile is giggling in his coffee cup right now, thinking that he’s really come up with a brilliant plan to make customers sign up for auto-pay, and we’re too dumb to catch on to his clever scheming. But guess what, fucknuts? I am dropping you assholes next year for making my life more irritating than it needs to be.

Why MSD might have issues collecting funds

When I moved into this house four years ago, I set up an auto-pay account with MSD (St. Louis’s Metropolitan Sewer District, for those lucky enough to have never heard of them before.) I have pretty much ignored it ever since. Periodically they take some money out of my account, my sewer continues to work, and that’s about how much thought I want to put into the whole affair.

A few months ago they sent me a letter, saying that all the old recurring bill payments were being discontinued, due to “maintenance.” Which, that’s a pretty shitty maintenance if you ask me. The kind of maintenance you do that means money stops coming at you automatically is stupid fucking “maintenance.”

I noticed lately in my MS Money register that I had a bill coming up from MSD. So I assumed they’d, you know, BILL me, since they’d discontinued the way that I used to send them money. But no. They did not. So now I start to worry that they’re going to try to not bill me, then charge me a late fee. That sounds about their speed, given the level of ineptitude they’ve evinced so far. So I go online and try to log into my old account. No dice – discontinued. I try to set up a new account as they’ve asked me to do. I come up with a new user id (TEN characters? That’s really long. Isn’t the standard six? Perversely, the password only has to be four characters. Don’t ask me, it makes no sense.) and give them my email address. But no, want to set up new online profile, but can’t do it. To set up a new online account, you need your account number. I have no idea what that might be, as I do not have any old bills (do I even GET mailed bills which would have my account number on them? I don’t remember getting them. I would hope I don’t get mailed bills even though I pay online, but who knows.) and naturally they have helpfully NOT INCLUDED MY ACCOUNT NUMBER IN THE LETTER THEY SENT TO MY HOUSE.

They HAVE included a customer service number, which I call. It has an option for online bill pay setup. It tells me to go online and set that shit up. Helpful! Thanks! The other option is to request a form be mailed to me for online signup. Since I am not my own grandma, I skipped having them mail me the online signup form. Those being the only two options, I tried to back out of that part of their phone system. Helpfully, at this point they disconnected me. Not to be daunted by this, I called them again. This time I pressed the options that would lead me to a customer service worker with whom, it was promised, I could discuss my bill. I thought that I could at least pay by phone this time, and then get the online bill pay set up. Or maybe she could give me my account number. Nope! Their call center is only open from 9-5 on Monday thru Friday! That is SO HELPFUL OH MY HOLY JESUS.

So I give up for today, thinking I will call them on Monday and get this sorted, and that they are assholes. Then five minutes later I get an email from MSD congratulating me on setting up my new online account! :-/

What the fuck MSD, you totally fail at taking my money.

Credit Card Industry Aims to Profit From Sterling Payers

Credit cards have long been a very good deal for people who pay their bills on time and in full. Even as card companies imposed punitive fees and penalties on those late with their payments, the best customers racked up cash-back rewards, frequent-flier miles and other perks in recent years.

Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

via Credit Card Industry Aims to Profit From Sterling Payers – NYTimes.com.

I don’t do credit cards. I know I should have one for emergencies and to book rental cars and things like that, but I don’t like credit cards, and I don’t want to carry one. This story reconfirms that for me, as does the fact that my Mom’s credit card company just tried to scam her like this last week. They arbitrarily changed her billing cycle, and they must have shortened it dramatically. She paid her credit card bill in full (a whole $26!) and was shocked to get a notice that she had been one day late on the payment. For this – one day late – she was charged a $19 late fee and $2 in interest. So, $21 in fees on a $26 bill. She called and complained and they dropped it, but I don’t know that everyone would pay that kind of attention.

My mom is particularly scrupulous about paying bills, and she pays them as soon as they arrive, so so knew there was no way she had actually been late. But this kind of thing sickens me. I think that credit card companies will be the next big wave of greedy jackasses that we have to bail out – all because they want to give free money to people who can’t pay it back, so that those people will be chained to their penalties, fees and high interest rates for life. Now that they’re cracking down on them abusing stupid poor people, they’re going to start trying to abuse good but unobservant customers. Just be aware, and keep a close eye on your statements.

Protected: On Dipshits and Their Habits

Your privacy rights just got raped by Viacom

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom | Threat Level from Wired.com

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday….

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

OK this really pisses me off – in that helpless, out-of-my-control, digital-age way.

I have been accused of NO wrongdoing, yet all my online activity is subject to search and seizure by a corporation, for them to sift through at the leisure (as well as most likely leak, lose or publish due to gross employee negligence. Come one, we all know the history on these things) And I have not been given the opportunity to challenge that?

So this completely destroys ANY expectation of privacy that anyone ever had online, especially for any service you have to log in to access. Some judge can just turn all your records, along with your name, over to whomever he wants, for a fishing expedition, arguing that it’s no violation of your privacy. I demand to differ.

This is absolute, pure privacy violation, when I haven’t even been accused of any crime. I wouldn’t let fucking Viacom in my house to take notes on what I was doing & watching online, what right does some judge have to hand all of our personal data over to them? The real breach here is that the user’s names and IP addresses are included – anonymous usage data should be PLENTY to give them what they need, without violating the privacy of YouTube’s members.

This is disgusting. Who knows what they will do with this data outside their stated purpose -  and they shouldnt’ even have access to it for their STATED purpose, either.

I want to punch someone in the face for this, and as usual with this kind of ephemeral “a judge ruled today…” outrage, there’s no one here to target.

Fuck the way we live our lives, seriously. We are powerless over anything.

Nonsense Charges

So I recently upgraded my phone, because my other phone was ancient and sad, and I wanted one with a camera*. I also wanted the option to browse the web while away from my computer. Overall it’s handy and I like it. I got one with a fold-out keypad, which makes my life easier when texting (esp. while driving! (No, no, I kid! (or maybe not))) and it was fun to send all my vacation updates straight from my phone to TwitPic.

The phone has more bells and whistles, which I don’t need or want – like mobile IM. Texting is immediate enough for me, really, I don’t need to pay per line to IM someone via phone. And if I was needing to contact someone I can’t text for some reason, I can email them from the phone too. I can do that:

• via my Google account
• send a text message to an email address
• or take advantage of their “mobile email” feature

This is where the nonsense charges come into play.

OK so they have this mobile email thing, and it’s only working with Yahoo! and AOL accounts right now. My main provider is AT&T/Yahoo! (Hi federal agents, you dirty spying bastards! *waves*) so I plugged in the details for two of my Yahoo!-related accounts. I didn’t ever check them though, because they’re all auto-forwarded to my main Gmail account, which I can check via the browser in the phone (which is free) rather than pay per email via their mobile-email thing. The only thing that happened is that I started getting these annoying “Mobile email requests to start! Yes/No?” messages all the time, to which I would say “No” and then get another immediate message “Mobile email requests to start! Yes/No?” (from the second account).

Today I went to check my account balance and saw a TON of text-message charges. Usually two in quick succession, and frequently at times when I was asleep, or knew I wasn’t using my phone. They all came from a 4-digit code I didn’t recognize. Now, since I just told you this story in this order, you will see what was happening, but I didn’t. I called my phone company and “Joe” the Bangladeshi customer service agent explained to me that each time the phone beeped “Mobile email requests to start! Yes/No?” at me, it charged me $.05, whether I actually started mobile email or not. And I got double the love because it had the contact details for 2 of my accounts. Awesome! So I had to go turn that feature off. I am not even adding up how much I got charged over the course of the month, because it would aggravate me, and it’s probably less than $15 all-told, so I refuse to get aggravated over it. But anyway, these phone companies are cunning with the nonsense charges, that’s for sure!

*also I thought I lost my phone last month, and I was on the way to the store to get a new one when I found my old one down the side of the passenger seat. And I was already excited in my head about the new phone I was getting, so after a few more weeks of “But you don’t NEED a new phone!” I succumbed.

CEO Bullshit Speak – Untranslated/Translated.

Starbucks Earnings Sink 21%

“Fiscal 2008 is a transitional year for Starbucks and, while our financial results are clearly being impacted by reduced frequency to our U.S. stores, we believe that as we continue to execute on the initiatives generated by our transformation agenda, we will reinvigorate the Starbucks Experience for our customers,” Howard Schultz, who is chairman, president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Translation:

Ain’t nobody got no money for $6 cuppa coffee no mo’. Where da fuck my golden parachute at? I be bailing up outta dis motherfucker, quick-like.

Alternate theory: Could be that the recent resurgence of this old logo has scared their customers away. Nothing like a mermaid brandishing her splayed tails at you to turn you off your coffee/tea. I mean, ewwwww. I just can’t decide if they had laLohan or BSpears as their model for this crotch shot.

War is Good for the Economy

Our amoral health and legal systems

STLtoday – News – Washington

WASHINGTON — The family of a Missouri woman must reimburse Wal-Mart for nearly a half-million dollars in medical expenses now that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review her case.
…
Her family later settled a lawsuit with the trucking company whose driver was involved in the accident. After attorneys’ fees and expenses, $417,477 was put in a trust for Shank’s care. That settlement money, plus $51,739 that Shank will have to pay out of pocket, must be paid to Wal-Mart.

As is common for employer-sponsored health plans, Shank’s insurance required full repayment of medical expenses if she received money from a lawsuit.

This is the story of a woman who was injured in a car accident. Her wonderful Wal-Mart Health insurance paid the bills (in itself a miracle, from what I have heard) but when she settled a lawsuit against the truck driver who hit her, Wal-Mart demanded all of the settlement money PLUS – get this – PLUS $51,739 that they want the family of this now-mentally-disabled woman to pay OUT OF POCKET to them for some obscure legal reason.

So, your health insurance pays your bills, then you have to pay it all back and live out the rest of your disabled, mentally handicapped life in squalor, because fucking WAL-MART took the money that was meant to provide for your care. Plus an extra $50k for the hell of it, because you’ve obviously got that lying around, since you worked at fucking WALMART.

I assume that since she’s now handicapped and unable to work they’ve also canceled any coverage for her, so they’re no longer paying for anything and she’s all on her own.

Anyone who shops at Wal-Mart, or Sam’s, or anywhere else that fucking corporation owns, is contributing to the same amoral system that caused this to happen. You’re saying “Oh, sucks that they do that, but I just saved seventy-two cents!” It’s bullshit, they are a plague on our country. In my opinion their low prices come at too great a cost.

More on Bush’s Unwarranted Wiretapping Fiasco

AT&T: Your world. Delivered. To the NSA.

Originally uploaded by lawgeek

Bush says would veto House eavesdropping bill – Yahoo! News

Bush said the litigation against the phone companies was “unfair” because they had been assured by the U.S. government that their cooperation was “legal and necessary” to fighting terrorism after the September 11 attacks.”Companies that may have helped us save lives should be thanked for their patriotic service, not subjected to billion dollar lawsuits that will make them less willing to help in the future,” Bush said.

Oh, I disagree. As does the EFF and anyone with any sense. Read this analysis by Salon.com blogger Glen Greenwald about the Democrats in Congress finally finding the sack with their brains and balls in it. (bolding his)

It’s critical to emphasize …that the telecoms already have immunity under existing statutes, even if they broke the law, as long as they obtained from the Attorney General certifications that the warrantless surveillance requests were legal. If the telecoms really did obtain those certifications — and it’s extremely unlikely that they did — then all they ever had to do was just show them to the court and they would be immune. Their excuse up until now — “we can’t use the documents we have to defend ourselves because we aren’t allowed to show them to the judge” — is now completely eliminated by the House bill.

Edit: They actually DID it! They rejected telecom immunity. Now let’s see Bush put America in danger himself by his refusal to pass it.

Scare Yourself

Billboard Liberation Strikes Out at Domestic Spies AT&T

NSA_2

Originally uploaded by Billboard Liberation Front

Too bad that the remaining Americans who don’t already know about AT&T’s domestic spying probably have no idea what the NSA is, or does.

From the Billboard Liberation Front’s Press Release:

AT&T initially downplayed its heroic efforts in the War on Terror, preferring to serve in silence behind the scenes. “But then we realized we had a PR win on our hands,” noted AT&T V.P. of Homeland Security James Croppy. “Not only were we helping NSA cut through the cumbersome red tape of the FISA system, we were also helping our customers by handing over their e-mails and phone records to the government. Modern life is so hectic – who has time to cc the feds on every message? It’s a great example of how we anticipate our customers’ needs and act on them. And, it should be pointed out, we offered this service free of charge.”

Insurance Fears Lead Many to Shun DNA Tests

What is the definition of a broken healthcare system? Is it a system in which those who are ill do not seek treatment, because they cannot pay the exorbitant cost of treatment for even a simple illness or injury? A system in which the “health care provider” withholds life-saving treatment, because the patient has no money? Or is it a system in which people refuse to even learn whether or not they have a disease, or will develop a disease, for fear that they will never be able to get the all-coveted, much-feared “health care coverage”?

I believe that of the many immoral, shameful and harmful practices American society sanctions, our allowing health care to be run as a for-profit enterprise is the very worst. It’s detrimental not only to us as individuals, but also to society as a whole. Continue reading »

Canceled Cancer Patient Awarded $9 Million

Canceled Cancer Patient Awarded $9 Million, California Insurer Will Begin Using A Review Panel Before Dropping Policies – CBS News

I couldn’t even choose which part of this article to quote; the whole thing is so fucked up. Lady is taken advantage of and persuaded to change insurers, she’s diagnosed with cancer, she’s going in for surgery when she hears her new insurer is cancelling her coverage. Then, her doctors stop her cancer treatment because the bills aren’t getting paid. Yeah, you read that right. Can’t pay? Feel free to die. Then the woman who canceled this patient’s policy is awarded a performance bonus for how much money she saved the company. The whole thing takes a four-year legal battle to decide, when it could have been over with in 5 minutes if the people involved had any regard for human decency and life instead of money.

I live in an excessively fucked up country.

…and for what?

For a little bit of money.

There’s more to life than money, you know.

- Marge Gundersen in “Fargo”