Now to follow up my change of phone supplier. This isn’t another rant, but things did go from bad to hysterical (and that was the Roger’s manager that I spoke to!) It only took an hour and a half on the phone to them trying to work out why I couldn’t transfer my number. Seems that I had been given bad information a month ago about how to transfer numbers – seems I shouldn’t have cancelled my Rogers account, I should have just let Fido take the number. Cancelling an account makes the number unavailable. Now, that sounds all well and good, but the manager then told me I had to pay for 30 days of use after the number had been taken. I told him I didn’t understand. It seems it’s in the contract. I can’t close my account and then move the number 30 days later. I have to move the number straight away and pay for a month I cannot possibly use. The manager, to his credit, tried all sorts of different things, and eventually came to the conclusion it was impossible to not pay for a service I wasn’t using. It was at this point be became slightly hysterical and started laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I mentioned (laughingly) that in the UK it would be called highway robbery, so he said, and this is the big mistake, “How is it done in Europe?”, so I told him that all the things we pay for in Canada are “free” in the UK. Well we parted on good terms. I learned something, and so did he. Any longer and I’m sure Cath and I would have been invited over for dinner. His parting shot was to thank me for being understanding and that he would refund a lot of the charged for me while writing up lengthy notes.

So, it was a surprise email I received on Monday (a bank holiday as well!) asking for $270. Seems that during the process on Friday during which my account had to be temporarily reopened (for about an hour) and then closed I incurred an early contract termination fee! Blimey. Even though me and Mahmood were good friends by now, I didn’t think I could cope with another session (I’d have been no good at the START talks!) so Cath had a quiet word with a rep who put her on hold to read the notes. God only knows how many there were because he was gone a good few minutes. He finally came back and told us that everything had been refunded. So, after a month and almost three hours of phone calls I now have kept my number and changed service provider! Yaay!