In June, 2009 I brought my Blackberry Pearl cellphone into my local Bell Mobility store for repair. I was on my phone one day when the screen suddenly went black and stopped working. I was told that I did not need to send the phone back and a new one would be shipped to me as soon as possible. I was given a loner phone that did not have the smart phone services offered with the blackberry, however I was still paying for the same plan that included those services. I waited for my phone to come back and called the store after a month. My phone had not arrived yet and no one knew when it would. So, I waited and called back monthly. There was still no sign of my phone.
November came along and I had still not received word of the whereabouts of my phone, so I went directly to the Bell store, only to discover that my phone had been shipped to the wrong address in August. When I asked why a new phone had not been shipped to me, I discovered that Blackberry had changed their policy and I had to send my old blackberry in for repair. If their was anything wrong with it, such as a cracked screen, or watermarks, I would have to pay for the phone's repair, even though one had already been shipped to me for free. Since I knew that there was no physical damage done to my phone, I thought there would be no harm in sending the old one in, if it meant that I would get a new one back. This was not the case. I was not going to receive a new phone at all. Blackberry instead, offered to send my phone back, with a $75 repair fee.
I had already been paying for a service that I was not receiving for 6 months, so I decided to just cancel the plan and not get my phone repaired. I was told that there would be a fee of over $700 to cancel the plan. There is no way that I should have to pay this fee, when it was Bell who breeched the contract in the first place. I had been paying for a service for 6 months, that I had not received. When I called customer service to straighten this whole mess out, I was continually put on hold and moved up the ladder. After three hours of this I was transferred to a voice recording, "thank you for choosing Bell, have a nice day." Thank you, Bell, for wasting 3 hours of my day!
I have not heard back from bell about this issue, until today, (March, 16) when I received a letter in the mail stating that my bill will be sent to a collections agency if I do not pay it within 5 business days. The date on the letter is March 6, and when I called bell, I received a message that the bill has already been sent to collections. My plan has been cancelled, but they still want the cancellation fee from me. The customer service reps were all incredibly rude, which is no surprise. I even faxed all of the documents I had received from Bell since June, because the man I spoke to on the phone told me that he didn't believe that any of this happened. Quite an elaborate story for a consumer to just make up, isn't it?
Now I have to decide whether it's worth hiring a lawyer to fight this case, or if I should just pay up. However, after almost 10 months of nonsense, dealing with either incompetent, or completely rude employees and receiving no compensation for the months of paying for a service, which I was not receiving, I am definitely leaning towards fighting.
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