The EVIL phone company

My phone company seems to be a little strange in their billing practices. I tend to do a lot of my banking and bill paying online. A couple of months ago, I set my phone account to automatically deduct my monthly charge from my checking account. I forgot about this last December and manually made an online payment later in the month.

This is where things get strange. I checked my phone bill this month and it was over 3 times the usual amount.


Huh? So, I checked my payment history. Here it is below:

As you can see, there was an automatic online payment on December 6th. Then there was a second online payment (the manual payment) on the 20th that was refused (probably because my bank noticed the duplicate charge and cancelled it).

So, what did the phone company do? They charged me a $25 penalty for having the payment refused, then had the $22.28 refused amount (excess payment) and the $25 penalty added to my January bill. Gee...you get penalized for paying too much!

To add injury to insult...it took 15 minutes with customer support to get this straightened out.

Ya gotta love the phone company!