bunsen_h

Don't make long-distance calls from a pay telephone using a credit card. Seriously.

A month ago, I needed to make a couple of phone calls from my hotel in Mississauga to Ottawa. Since the hotel tacks on a surcharge to make such calls from its rooms, I figured I'd save myself a couple of dollars by using the Bell pay phones in the lobby.

The charges appeared on this month's credit card statement. The charges were applied by a company I'd never heard of, WiMac Tel, in Calgary. A 2-minute call on Friday evening was billed at $12.72; a 1-minute call on Sunday afternoon billed at $11.49 .  Mississauga-to-Ottawa, off-peak hours; the charges should probably have been more like $0.72 and $0.49 .

Apparently Bell outsources long-distance pay-phone calls on credit cards to this other outfit, which tacks on ludicrous surcharges, with no warning. My research on the net indicates that WiMac claims that callers are given notice of the charges in advance, in a message on the phone. This was certainly not true for the calls I made.  I'm obsessive about such things; I would have listened to such a message and checked for details.

BMO MasterCard would not allow me to dispute the charges.  Since I gave Bell my credit card number and they provided the service (or, to be more precise, the service was provided), it was out of BMO's hands, even though the service was provided in a way I had not authorized via an expensive third party.  BMO told me that I needed to take the matter up with Bell.

I spent some time wandering through the maze on Bell's website, trying to find some way of contacting them about pay-phone service.  There isn't one.  I gave up and called the contact number for home-phone service.  I think I was lucky that I reached a Bell customer-service rep who was on my side.  He will be applying a refund for the credit-card charges towards my next bill from Bell, for internet service.

But... sheesh.  I'm not impressed by BMO.  Nor, in general, by Bell, though that's nothing new.
 

Over the years, I've tended to categorize salesbeings into three categories. As the man says, “Just a useful distinction, to clarify thought.” The categories aren’t hard and fast; poor business ethics, for example, tend to make me downgrade a salesbeing to a lower category.

Salespeople understand what their organization can produce, and what prospective customers need. They help to put the two together. Everybody wins. Sales people can be extremely important for a commercial organization.

Salescritters don’t understand what their organization can produce, or what prospective customers need. Or they just don’t care very much. The important thing is to make a sale and get a commission, or at least to remain employed and collect a salary. They may commit their organization to something that it simply doesn’t have the resources to do in the available time (or at all), or the customer to purchasing something they don’t need and can ill afford. They may claim that a product has features that the customer is specifically looking for, when it really doesn't.  They can cause trouble for an organization.

Salesthings don’t understand what is physically possible, and may attempt to sell something that not only has nothing to do with their organization’s business, and doesn’t exist, but violates the laws of physics. For example, a salesthing for a software company who tries to sell a mining-exploration company on a potential new product that they can just pour on the rock to make the rock go away, on the principle that “one of our guys is a chemist, I’m sure he can figure out how to do it.” They tend to cause a different kind of trouble than the salescritters, primarily by being so obviously incompetent and insane that they scare away clients who might actually be interested in what the organization can do.