<\/p>\n
by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m one of those consumers who always assumes there\u2019s a mistake \u2014 and not <\/em>in my favor \u2014 in the bills that arrive in my mailbox. I\u2019m not always right about that, but mostly it turns out to be true. When my wireless phone bill arrived this month, my eyes popped out. How the heck did I rack up these charges? Upon more careful examination, I noticed that the higher rate for international coverage for my Blackberry that I needed when I went overseas during the holidays had never been changed back to normal, despite my request \u2014 the day I arrived back in the U.S. \u2014 that it be done. I also noticed that my son had racked up 850 text messages<\/strong> sending inane one-word notes to his friends umpteen times a day. Hey, but I thought I had signed him up for unlimited texting?<\/p>\n I called the company<\/a> and can report that my story has a happy ending. They had on record that I had called in January to change my service, so they credited me the extra charges, plus the hefty taxes, and they changed my son\u2019s cell phone over to unlimited texts retroactively, so we didn\u2019t have pay for the extra 500 texts. (Turns out that hadn\u2019t been an overcharge after all; my son really had only 250 free ones coming, which explained the $64 extra on my bill.) I saved nearly $140 by taking the time to call!<\/p>\n What worries me, however, is when consumers don\u2019t call and question charges on their bills, utilities companies are only too happy to keep their money<\/a>. I worry about consumers<\/a> with limited English, the elderly, or people working two jobs who just don\u2019t have the time it takes to challenge the kind of charges I saw on my bill. As sure as day turns into night, the corporations who send out monthly bills are making millions from consumers who cannot or do not challenge unfair charges. Should companies have people on staff who routinely review consumer bills to see if there are unfair charges? I think that would be great PR for any corporation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director I\u2019m one of those consumers who always assumes there\u2019s a mistake \u2014 and not in my favor \u2014 in the bills that arrive in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3121"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11682,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3121\/revisions\/11682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}