New Glasgow (Southam) — A New Glasgow man was shocked to get a phone bill last week for more than $19,000.

“It’s pretty crazy,” Jeff MacDonald said of his advance bill for the period between September and October.

MacDonald’s EastLink Cable telephone bill claimed he had 847 phone lines, a concept difficult to imagine in the small two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife Rhonda and their two-year-old daughter.

And to add insult to injury, he said, the reality is that EastLink is in debt to him for about $70.

“They actually owe me money. I don’t even owe them money.”

MacDonald said things became even more bizarre when he contacted the cable company to try to have the situation resolved.

“The first people actually hung up on me there,” he said. “I don’t think they wanted to deal with it.”

The MacDonalds had been buying their television cable, Internet and telephone service from EastLink, and paid their bill by credit card through automatic monthly withdrawals. But he said they were in the process of cancelling those services after becoming frustrated by past billing problems.

“I cancelled because they kept messing my bill up,” MacDonald said. “This is actually the fifth time they overcharged my account. They always fixed it, it just took a couple of months to do it.”

MacDonald said an EastLink representative accepted responsibility for the error, but he was further dismayed when he learned the company could do nothing to correct the situation, because the billing information had already been electronically transmitted to his credit-card company.

Jennifer Murray, an assistant customer service manager with EastLink, said the company won’t discuss the accounts of individual customers. Speaking hypothetically, she acknowledged that the situation faced by the MacDonalds is “not an ordinary case,” but added that is not the way Eastlink normally operates.

“We understand it’s a frustration when a customer gets a bill that’s incorrect,” she said. “Generally speaking, when a customer calls about a problem, it is fixed immediately.”

Murray said computer technology simply doesn’t let Eastlink reverse automatic withdrawals once they’ve been executed.

She stressed that the company does take overbilling situations seriously, and if financial charges are incurred by a customer as a result of an error, those costs will be reimbursed.

Halifax

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2002