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A Polish environmental group placed a GPS tracker on the back of a stork, it lost the tracker in Sudan, and then someone put the sim card in their own phone and racked up hours worth of phone calls
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- Title
- Stork lands charity with huge phone bill
- Published
- Jun 28 2018
- Word count
- 227 words
Heya! Here's a funny article that I wanted to share. Does anyone have recommendations on how to deal with the tags on post like this? I have no idea how to tag this except for something like 'funny'
Taking a stab at it, I might've posted to ~science with the "humor" and "blog" tags
funny, anecdote, blog, poland, sudan, stork, bird migration, sim, gps, trackingMany years ago, when my wife took herself off her parent's cellular plan she simply gave the flip phone to her dad and figured that was the end of it. She had no way to cancel the line since her dad was the only authorized user on the account. A few months went by and her dad calls pissed off that she's been wracking up tons of international calls. She reminds him that she returned the phone to him and she has no idea what he did with it after that. Turns out he had just left it on the counter at his house and one of the many workers they had in and out while remodeling swiped it and had been passing it around for people to call Mexico and South America. In the two months it took him to figure it out and cancel the line they made about $8,000 worth of calls. He tried threatening to cancel his account, but ATT informed him that he would still be held liable and incur a bunch of cancellation fees as well.
I've never heard a heartwarming story about AT&T.
Ouch. I used to work for AT&T Wireless, before they got bought by Cingular, until shortly after they got bought by at&t. I'm not sure if the policies have changed, but at the time we could refund a certain period of service on a lost-or-stolen device. It was either 2 weeks or a month I think. We wouldn't have been able to do a full 2 months, some of that responsibility is squarely on him.
Another thing we could do is a "rerate", where we pretend he signed up for a long-distance plan before this happened, and bill him according to that.
Maybe a very nice rep would do both if they were a long time customer with several lines and they weren't all angry and swearing at us, telling us this is our fault and threatening to cancel service etc. Not saying that's what your father-in-law did, but it's very common, and the main reason I'd end up refusing to help people in situations like this.
I wasn't there, but I can guarantee that is exactly what he did. It makes me smile to know that there are things that could have been done to make him pay less if he wasn't such an asshole. Sadly, I work with him and know just how much of an asshole he can be when things don't go his way.