Phone Service

I got another letter today for one of the other 2 guys in town with the same name as me. (One is a nearly deadbeat landlord guy that's often at the City Council meetings wearing his scouting shirt yelling about something or the other. The other is a student that has something like 20 Credit cards all with $350-500 he owes on them, or so it appears.) Anyway, this one was for the guy that owns property, it was from a law firm in Indiana looking for $1700 from him for a tree that fell. They called last week, I helped them try to understand I'm not the guy they are looking for. I called back today, they appologized for the mistake and told me to ignore the letter.

This is the last straw. It' time to go back to an unlisted number again. I never had any of these troubles before when I was unlisted.

I have been thinking for a while that I would like to get Caller ID and Call Waiting. We currently just have a basic plan, $25 a month after taxes, fees, and whatever else the phone company decides to tack on for that month.

Our current phone company, Comcast, has us grandfathered into the old plan. To add services, we would have to switch to the current plan, and basic phone, Caller ID & Call Waiting is $39 (After tax). They have a plan with VM, free long distance and everything else for $46. (After tax) With Comcast, unlisted (really unpublished, which means no 411) is $1.80 a month.

Our ISP also does phone service, they just have one plan, it include VM, caller ID, call waiting, and all the other bells and whistles, it's $25 + taxes and fees. (I figure at most $35.) Unlisted number is free.

I called the ISP back to sign up for the service, they said it would be $50 to roll their truck, and $25 for the intallation. I told the girl that I didn't want to do that, she put me on hold to talk to her supervisor about it. After a few minutes she came back and said that they could give me a free month of Internet service, but that was all they could do. I didn't sign up as a result, but told her that if they ever changed their mind and were ready to do free installation, they could call me back and I would do it. (It's also combined billing, which would be a pain, since work pays my internet for me...)

The do free initial installation, it turns out that's the very first time they come to set up services at the house. (For me, this was when I switched my internet service to them) Had I done all the services at once, it would have been free installation. No one told me then that was how it worked. I'm thinking about sending in a letter to the ISP...

Anyway, I called Comcast back, and just got the $1.80 unpublished number. In a week or 2, they will be by to your house to cross our number out of your phone book...