I stand corrected.
Nice mouth.
Wonder what you would have said if I said I bought it while living in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. :rolleyes:
He was as polite as you were to Marley23.
He would have said the exact same thing. Where you bought your device and where you grew up is irrelevant. Marley23 is in New York and you were replying to him.
(a) What hajario said.
(b) My question about Radio Shack was actually supposed to be a little tongue-in-cheek jibe, not a snarky insult. I guess i should make more frequent use of smilies.
You wanna nitpick? Fine. I said, " No offense, but you are exactly wrong". I didn’t impugn his fact-gathering techniques in a snarky way. I repeated what I was told when I bought the device. ( Obviously erroneously ).
That’s a far cry from " Do you get all your legal advice from Radio Shack? "
I said I stand corrected. I meant it.
mhendo, sorry it didn’t come off tongue in cheek. I do believe that you meant it that way, and wouldn’t have responded as such if it felt like humor instead of a cheap shot.
You want to stir the shit, go pick another Doper, m’kay? I apologized twice now. I misunderstood the tone of his/her remark. If that ain’t good enough for the likes of you, hajario then that is your problem, not mine. 
Since companies like AOL and pretty much every company you call records the calls with nothing but a statement that ‘this call may be monitored for training or quality assurance purposes’, I wonder if that means you could just start of by telling the rep that this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes and then consider it consent as long as the rep doesn’t hang up.
This makes me scared for when I have to cancel my AOL account next week (I’m on broadband now with a good provider, hehehe!).
It shouldn’t. Find out what British Law has to say about wiretapping. Go to Radio Shack or the equivalent store you’ve got there, and if you are in full compliance of local and national law, record it.
One is good, two is better. And good luck !! 
Not a big deal. I am glad that my colleagues are better informed about this than the guys at Radio Shack, since this is something we’d need to know.
INAL but it should work since if the representative has no expectation of privacy since s/he’s already being recorded and if the company didn’t want callers making their own records they could diconnect the call.
When I cancelled AOL in favor of Comcast, I called to cancel and the conversation went like this:
ME: “I need to cancel my account”
AOL HACK: " But sir, do you know about our…"
ME: Click.
2nd call.
ME: “I need to cancel my account”
AH: “But sir, do you know about our…”
ME: Click
3rd Call.
ME: “I need to cancel my account”
AH: “OK Sir, is there anything else I can do for you?”
ME: “Nope, just that”
AH: “OK, your account is cancelled”
Just like tech support anywhere, if you’re not getting anything out of it, hang up, call back. You’re bound to strike gold somehwere.
I had a doozy of a reason when I cancelled Dish Network and went with cable.
I work for a company that’s owned by said cable company. As a nice benefit, I get high speed internet and cable with all the premium movie channels for free.
So when I told Dish the reason I was cancelling (they were sorry for losing such a valued customer, by the way) was because I could get my cable for free, their only comeback was “Oh. Well, the picture is better with Dish.”
Yeah. I think I can stand a perfectly fine picture (that doesn’t go out in a storm) for the sake of saving $60 a month.
They called me back about six months later to try to entice me, a Valued Customer, back. Again, I explained that as an employee of the cable company, I got my cable and all the premium movie channels for free.
But the picture is better!
I told them not to call me anymore.
Oh, and chalk me up to “John” is now “Bill” and still employed with AOL.
Has anyone heard of anyone cancelling since the Vincent Incident? I’m curious as to how they’re handling cancellation calls today.
I never worked retention, but I did do low level technical support back in the day. It wasn’t uncommon, upon getting a difficult customer demanding a supervisor (for something we knew was policy and wouldn’t change), to put the customer on hold, grab the tech next to us and say “You wanna be a supervisor?”.
The second tech would reiterate the policy, and since he was a ‘Supervisor’ the customer would usually believe him.
Not something I am necessarily proud of now that I am older and wiser, but it happened.
[QUOTE=Sierra Indigo]
Well then a) The laws in that state and country are pretty shoddy or b) If the laws are in place, someone need(s/ed) to report that company (and other companies that do the same) to the relevant ruling body.
One of the good things about working in AU is that it’s actually prohibited for a company to prevent a customer from speaking to a manager/team leader if they request it. If a customer wants an escalation, by golly you escalate that call or the relevant Ombudsman will be coming down on your and the company’s heads with fines that range up into the thousands for the rep, and the hundreds of thousands for the company. So even if the company wanted us to fuck customers around, we couldn’t do it on a legal basis.
QUOTE]
I never worked retention, but I did do low level technical support back in the day. It wasn’t uncommon, upon getting a difficult customer demanding a supervisor (for something we knew was policy and wouldn’t change), to put the customer on hold, grab the tech next to us and say “You wanna be a supervisor?”.
The second tech would reiterate the policy, and since he was a ‘Supervisor’ the customer would usually believe him.
Not something I am necessarily proud of now that I am older and wiser, but it happened.
Nice… bad coding and douple post. If anyone finds a typo in there I believe I will have scored a hat trick… sorry…
Well, a lot of AOL users are, or at least used to be, that stupid. When I worked in tech support there was a high degree of correlation between the stupidity of the caller and whether they were an AOL user. Once I had a woman insist that her email address was “dumbass at dot com aol”.
Consider it a hat trick in the overtime period. 
So did mine. I took the advice, as AOL was directly withdrawing the fee from my savings account each month. Once I had the new account (same bank, just a different number), I called AOL to cancel. After getting several elements of the runaround already described in this thread (“Don’t be hasty”, “A month of service costs less than a tank of gas”, “How about half price?”, “How about three free months?”), I finally heard a recording announcing that my account had been terminated.
However, the billing period had already begun (even though the regular monthly withdrawal date had come and gone before I changed the account, AOL had apparently forgotten to take the money). So I was still technically signed up as I waited for a bill to be sent. About a month later, I got a statement, asking that I pay up IMMEDIATELY to avoid having my account turned over to a collection agency. Oh, and since AOL hadn’t been able to access my account in a timely manner, I got a late fee tacked on for my impudence. Nevertheless, I sent a check that day.
So I was finally done with the accursed ISP? Oh, how I wish. Instead, I began to receive calls every couple of days. I’d pick up the phone, and a recorded voice would say “PLEASE CALL AMERICA ONLINE IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A SALES CALL. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BUSINESS MATTER.” When I called, I was asked why I hadn’t sent my payment. I replied that I HAD sent the check. “WELL, IT ISN’T HERE.” Well, I’m sorry, once the envelope is in the mailbox it’s the Postal Service’s responsibility.
Finally, the representative (I always got a barely articulate woman – not sure if it was the same one each time, but the apparent ethnic background was consistent throughout the ordeal) told me that the payment had been received and that my name had been taken off the list. Whoops, I shouldn’t have started that last sentence with “finally”. A few days later, I got a call from the “collection agency” (although the voice sounded suspiciously familiar) informing me that my delinquent account had been turned over. Again, I explained that I had sent the check, and that my monthly statement should be arriving soon. If no record of the check exists, I’ll write another one and stop payment on the first. Of course, the original will probably then mysteriously show up and be cashed before the “stop payment” order kicks in. But on the off chance that I soon may truly be able to ring down the curtain on my AOL experience, I’ll stop ranting now…
Apparently the easiest way to quit AOL is to post on the teen boards. My daughter accumulated six TOS violations in a few months that didn’t even make sense. One was for supposedly having her real name in her screen name, even though I patiently explained that “Mary Moo Cow” is not her name at all. One was for using the letters SOL (not the words, just the letters) and another was for copying a verse from the Bible–on the religion board (It was considered “witnessing” although she isn’t Christian so I can’t see how that was possible). This was not her fudging about her offenses; I got emails showing exactly the reason for the violations and they were all just that stupid.
They terminated my account for the last violation…talking about masturbation in a thread about whether it was a sin mentioned in the Bible. Her exact words were “Nothing is in the Bible about masturbation”.
It was considered using foul language. :rolleyes:
Of course I called and had AOL reinstated with the warning that if I got another TOS I’d be banned forever.
So I’m saving that for when we finally get hooked up with DSL. She can’t wait to post her Swan Song.
When I first talked to my bank about cancelling my AOL automatic withdrawal, I was told that all the financial institution could do would be to stop authorizing the EXACT AMOUNT that AOL was charging. One penny more or less, and the assumption on the bank’s part would be that I had willingly entered into a totally new business relationship with America Online. I envy you if your bank values your patronage so much as to allow you to preemptively reject any and all charges imposed by a given billing entity.