It is completely mind boggling what piss-poor customer service qwest has in some areas and how wonderful others can be. Please forgive me if I ramble on here but this was a mess with qwest from the word go.
We had a rather high phone bill for the month of October. Wasn't a great surprise considering we have a home phone line, a cellphone along with the tail end of paying for the cellphone itself all wrapped up on this bill. On October 14th, my wife sent in a $75.00 payment. I sent in a $100.00 payment on the 31st and my wife sent in another $200.00 on the 14th of November. According to our records, that left a remaining balance of $18.00.
During the course of all this, Qwest had shut off service to the cellphone (despite the fact that payments were coming in) but left the home line active. On November 17th, my wife phone Qwest to determine if the $200.00 payment had been received and to request the cellphone was turned back on. Much to her surprise, qwest telling her that the remaining balance was $53.54 coming from some "extra charges that qwest had found" and that it had actually been due by the 16th of November. Due to the fact that the payment had been due the day before, they had not only shut off service, which we were aware of, but they had deactivated the phone.
With this new information my wife inquired as to if this then removes her obligation to contract with qwest and the individual she was speaking with informed her that she was no longer under contract since they deactivated directly. The person she originally spoke with was not in the wireless department and did offer to connect her with the wireless to see if there was anything they could do to help us get the cellphone reactivated and services restored that day. The extremely rude, foul-mouthed, little shit that my wife was connected to, informed her that she had better learn to pay her bills and that if she didnt immediately call Qwest back after she paid the $53.54 and have the phone reactivated (of course for a reactivation fee) that they would bill us an additional $200.00 early deactivation fee.
When my wife tried to explain to this idiot that this seemed a tad strange to her that we would be responsible for a deactivation fee when Qwest directly deactivated this without customer consent or any real cause for deactivation. Let me quote what she was told by this individual. "Look, lady, as I said before you need to learn to pay your bill and you damn-well better get down there, pay this $53.54 and then you had better call us back or we are going to bill you that $200.00 early deactivation fee and there isnt anything you can do about that." As you can much imagine at this point my wife was considerable angry and I believe she actually called this guy and asshole and hung up on him.
After much discussion between my wife and myself, we decided to do some investigation just to confirm that what qwest was doing was not right or didnt seem right. We confirmed that according to their own website where they list Terms and Conditions, along with all the booklets and information sent with the cellphone, that the ONLY thing stated in regards to a $200.00 early deactivation fee, was if the customer was to request deactivation. Upon gathering all this information, my wife called Qwest back, and as you can well imagine, she was geared and ready for a fight. This was on November 25th.
It was our intent to completely get out from under qwest as far as the cellphone was concerned and point blank refuse to pay this $200.00. Fortuately, she was connected with one of the nicest individuals she has ever dealt with at qwest. Originally she started by giving him the facts and informing him she just wished to be done with the wireless service with them. The qwest rep. (we will call him L.) inquired as to why my wife was so upset. My wife then repeated the above story to L. L. checked the account and it was noted that she had called