[Consumer Rant] The ongoing @Virginmobilecan saga..!

In the continuing Virgin Mobility saga..

 

I was actually kind of surprised how much feedback (and bile!) I have received about Virgin Mobile Canada. Stories about how they'd bill people and not bother notifying them, just send the issue to collections when it eventually rolled over the $100 collection minimum. How they would pad fees without warning. Stories about price gauging (to be fair, they're a Canadian telecommunications company, it goes without saying they price gauge.) People who have had to call multiple times just to get their phones that were somehow locked out of Virgin's network working -- and these phones bought from Virgin! Stories upon stories about grumpy customer service agents, and service nightmares. A quick trip to the BBB today to get Virgin's mailing address showed me they have an "F" rating with the BBB. That's actually kind of impressive unto itself.

 

Anyway.

 

So, I told their agent no less than five times on June 19th I wanted to cancel my service since my sim chip hadn't shipped and I thought I'd been more than reasonable in my waiting. We argued, I hung up on him. I then informed the company three more times via email that I'd cancelled my account. (I didn't quite tell them they could suck it.) On the 21st I received a package from "Bell Mobility."  This package was not tracked, it was not from Purolator and I had received no notification of its shipping. Its shipping date, pure coincidence, I'm sure, was June 19th. I refused the package, so back it went.

 

Today (the 24th) I went down to the mall to see if the nice guy at the kiosk could tell if my account had actually been cancelled yet or not. He was busy trying to unlock a phone a lady had just bought that was apparently not able to connect to the virgin network. (I resisted asking if it could connect to Bell's.) He asked if he could help me while he was waiting on something, I gave him the brief overview of why I wanted to check if my account had been cancelled or not. (The nice lady didn't look particularly surprised, apparently she'd been having "fun" with Virgin's customer service too.) Unfortunately, he said, he needs a phone, an account number or a sim card to do anything for me. I thanked him and went back home. I then wrote Virgin a very nice letter about my account being cancelled, why and effective when.

 

I just got a e-bill via email from them for $30.

 

I figure it'll only take 15 years at 18.9% interest for it to reach over the $100 minimum collections filing limit in Canada. That gives me lots of time to argue with them.. after all, I have nothing but time on my hands and they have to pay their so called customer service agents $10/hour. I wonder how long it'll take me to rack up a mere three hours of their time to make it even less worth their while to come after me..