I got a strange bill from Sympatico, with lots of extra charges on my credit card statement. And I thought that perhaps my home network had been hacked and someone was doing something nefarious. It happened in the past, when I mistakenly left Yuka's firewall turned off. Someone uploaded 800megs of videos. Luckily it was not pr0n, but rather simpson's and bugs bunny videos. Then I remembered that sympatico's bandwith usage charges had been dropped. Purplexed I tried to find out my usage and whatnot online. Of course I could not get onto the secure site. The page after login would just hang. So, I called up the Bell Sympatico Customer Service d00ds. I hoped I'd Brin working at the call centre, but no luck.
1) Found out that the charge was from my dad's internet usage. I must have left my login/password set for his computer up north when I set up his computer last month. No problem there.
2) The Sympatico d00ds told me that since they could get to customer care page, it must be my fault; with various and sundry mutterings about firewalls and the like. (I'd already turned off my firewall, and blocking of pop-up adds while troubleshooting things before I called them.). While I was talking, I remembered how ProMac Sympatio !is. So I turned off Safari, and sparked up Internet Explorer. Voila. Sympatico's web site doesn't work with macs.
Their reason? They haven't bought a licence for Safari. So, I asked them if they were compatible with Mozilla, being all open source and all. Nope. Didn't buy a licence for that either, I was told. It is with answers like this that I back off slowly.
Customer service... isn't it great that we're a service culture now?
Posted by jason at September 4, 2003 11:53 AM | TrackBackBrin wouldn't've been able to help you with the billing issue anyway.. too bad, though. Keep trying! :)
Posted by: Brin. at September 4, 2003 08:41 PMBrin wouldn't've been able to help you with the billing issue anyway.. too bad, though. Keep trying! :)
Posted by: Brin. at September 4, 2003 08:48 PMNope. Not a service culture (or economy) any more. We've moved on to become an experience economy. Good thing too. With Sympatico's exceedingly poor customer service, at least we can now imagine it as experiencing a house of horrors, or some Kafka-esque experience. "Please buy a router from us, but don't ask us to support you any longer if you do..."
And speaking of poor sympatico service lately, we have experienced horrible reponse problems that I've tracerouted to somewhere in a Bellnexxia subnet in the Toronto NAP. Providing all the info to sympatico customer service folk so that they might be able to pass it up the line to Nexxia yielded this reply to the poor response problems: "First clear your browser cache... Unplug all the telephones in your house and try it again... Oh, you're running a router, well that may be the cause... "
Posted by: Mark Federman at September 5, 2003 08:44 AM[grin]
As Brin's told me, they're only allowed to read the script. And of course, we all know that tech problems can be solved by reading off the script.
And I'm not sure why my comment posted twice. I do apologize. I'll blame Sympatico. ;)
But yeah, always having to start at square one is probably more irritating to us than it is to ye.. you've gotta go through it a lot less frequently! Hehe. :)
Posted by: Brin. at September 5, 2003 03:57 PMWhat a nice site, you know )
Posted by: Underage at October 12, 2003 02:40 PMJust yesterday, my dad was saying that he hadn't seen a bill from Sympatico lately. When we first signed up, we gave them a credit card for payment. Later, my dad changed the credit card number and forgot to call bell and tell them and suffice to say, bell froze the service and contacted us. But now, w can't figure out what is going on. My dad checked his past banking statements and there were no charges from sympatico on any of them, than we checked the sympatico email, thinking that maybe they sent us a message, saying that we owed them money, but no message was ever sent and we would know because we rarely check our sympatico account email and there were tons of messages in the email. So we tried to logon to sympatico online customer service and the b1**** number was invalid, however I was able to logon to the email, but there weren't any messages there either. We called sympatico and found out we had this huge bill, but we were unable to talk to any one and we didn't really want to talk to anyone because, we were afraid they would try to tell us its quote (OUR Fault) that we didn't pay up. We never received any online invoices, by mail invoices or any email or phone calls from sympatico and the service is still operating.
What should we do? Has anyone else had this proplem?
Nice site you have!
Posted by: lolita at November 4, 2003 03:18 AMHUH )
Posted by: Preteen at November 10, 2003 10:31 AMGreetengs
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