Can you hear me now?

In January, after a long trial of trying to get our T-Mobile phones to work in the area we moved to recently, we gave up the fight and switched to Sprint. T-Mobile was very nice about it, admitting that their coverage basically sucks in this area, and happily canceled our service with no early termination fees.

Our trials with Sprint are for another post, but in general we've been happy with the service and very happy with our phones. Today, we received the final bill from T-Mobile. Although everything should have been canceled as of January 26, they were charging us another entire month of service: 1/28 - 2/27.

I'm not unfamiliar with this business, and of course I assumed it was something that would be corrected with a simple phone call - obviously, service had been canceled, as the number had been ported and the old phones no longer worked.

Upon calling T-Mobile, however, and explaining my predicament, I was met with this gem: "Your service didn't actually get canceled until January 28, and that's the start of your billing cycle for the month, so you get charged for the whole month."

I spent a bit of time arguing with the rep regarding the 1/28 date. We had 4 lines on our account, 3 of which were canceled on 1/26 when we showed T-Mobile proof of our new address. The other line was having the number ported to Sprint, which was supposed to happen on 1/26 as well (the day we got the new phones), but somewhere between Sprint and T-Mobile something got messed up and this didn't actually get processed until 1/28. My hunch is that it just took them 2 days to get their ducks in a row. But, it wasn't worth my time to keep arguing about 2 days and a few dollars. The heart of the matter was the charges after 1/28, which were substantial.

The rep kept to his position that we owed the full amount. He kept going back to the comment "You didn't cancel until 1/28." Finally, in my sweetest, most passive-aggressive voice, I said "I understand that service is billed a month in advance. That's not a problem. But by your own admission, service ended on January 28. So now all needs to be done is to issue a credit for all charges after that date." I was met with silence, and a request to hold. Shortly thereafter, he came back on the line, and within 5 minutes all the extra charges had been removed from my bill. Of course, later on when I was less mad, I thought about it and realized Hey, this is the end of March. They didn't bill us in advance, they billed us well after the fact! Too late now, although it makes the situation much more shady in my mind.

I can only assume that the reps are trained to try to make it sound like the consumer is required to pay these charges. Thankfully, I pride myself on being an informed consumer. But I wonder how many less-informed people have just said "Okay" and paid the charges? It's a shame such a great, 10-year relationship with T-Mobile ended on such a sour note. Oh well, at least I got out before the world ended.