"... this was a first offense..."
--spoken by representative of Verizon. (I prefer to say 'VERY-ZONE" or VERY ZO-ON because veritas in the ancient sense where it goes along with justice and beauty is not the name of the game here...if there's any veritas here it is construed very narrowly and legalistically....)
I purchased a mobile phone for my mother from Verry-Zone. We did not want to have monthly payments. And, in the past, whenever I owned a phone with a pre-paid card (something I have done four or five times in Slovakia and Austria, and even in these very United States) any balance remaining at the end of the month remained valid.
With Very-Zone, greed seems to rule. The pre-paid phones have the following annoying feature: If you do not use your phone for the entire two months, and carry a balance, you must still add more money--pay more money to the company--in order to continue using your phone. Correction: I am talking about a situation where we didn't use the phone, so we can't continue using it! I'm talking about the possibility in the future that we might want to use it... and we've got to pay for that--pay additionally!
Thus, it would be possible to pay ten dollars every sixty days in order to keep the phone activated... even if you've made no phone calls (except to purchase more time from the company)....
Oh, is it sixty days or thirty days? I've forgotten. But it doesn't matter! The point is that you have to pay even if you don't use your phone.
And in the meantime, the company has your money.
Today my mother's phone has zero balance because she neglected to add more money to the Very-Zone account. They've already got forty dollars of her money, so it's not unsurprising if my mother failed to take account of their greedy policy.
Do you say to me: LET THE BUYER BEWARE! Indeed, that's why we are supposed to have something called "consumer protection"... not that that would be a real solution given the status quo! what a joke.
But, no, I do not accept the suggestion that this is "My fault". Indeed, somewhere in the pages of small print included with the new phone there was (I suppose) an explanation of this policy. But when you give someone tons of useless information, it gets tiring to read it all, doesn't it?
And, you wonder, don't you, whether that isn't a deliberate policy too.....Something like "confusion marketing"....
Now when I did call Very-Zone, the very polite and intelligent lady whose conversation with me was recorded, did help me out since, as she put it this was "a first offense."
But, let's focus on the language here.
By not paying them money for a service I hadn't used but might use in the future, when they already had my (mother's) money, I had (in their eyes) commited a crime, an "offense".... the offense of not performing my civic duty as a red-blooded American, the offense of contributing to the growing gap between the richest and the poorest!
But I say they are committing an offense every month when they demand money.
Moreover, I've lost (or my mother has lost) the freedom to choose how much she uses her phone.
I think you've grasped my point.
Land of the Free? Ha Ha Ha. Make me laugh. Land of Private Tyrannies.
FOOTNOTE ABOUT PRIVATE TYRANNIES AND THE END OF NET NEUTRALITY:
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