Thursday Thoughts ~ 10/7/21

At first I claimed we were bamboozled, now I claim funny math. The AT&T saga wraps up. Yipee!!

Oh wait! I mean the nameless cell phone provider of which AT&T is just one option. Disclaimer: this is my two cents worth 1/2 a penny due to inflation. You guys and gals should make up your own mind.

Bamboozled underlined above links you back to my original post with the deets. In this post, I’ll share where we are now. Their accounting practices must be a bitch to reconcile when courtesy credit is how you make something right. Well courtesy credit and/or miscellaneous credit applied across three phone lines, two of which aren’t even impacted. How do they get away with this? Inquiring minds or minds with too much time on their hands want to know.

Okay, so in total we are entitled to a $700 over 30 months or approximately $23.33 per month account credit. Due to the racket run around, we were only getting $11.67. I won’t belabor the point about the monthly calls to complain we’ve been shorted the difference, instead here is the summary.

• $11.67 x 9 = $105.03 (credits given, 1/2 of what we’re owed to date)
• $11.66 x 7 = $81.69 (applied in August for 7 months of the shortage, a little bit was applied to each line for some odd, unknown, still not explainable to me, reason)
• $261.66 (result of my 9/3/21 call broken down by one time $250 credit for equipment and $11.66 one time courtesy credit)

Still with me? This meant there was no automatic draft from my account in September. Instead we received a bill with $63.82 credit. Now for October, we are in receipt of a bill for what should be our true amount due less the credit. When I look closer to confirm, I see that by line item, the statement still only shows $11.67 credit. But I think that’s ok, looks like we were paid off in advance for the difference. Now you tell me if I’m on to something …

$700 – $105.03 = $594.97 – $81.69 = $513.29 – $261.66 = $251.62 – $245.07 (21 future credit installments of $11.67) = $6.55. The provider is still ahead by a mere six dollars and 55 cents. I’m still miffed about the funny math but at least I no longer feel cheated. Especially when I also received a $15 courtesy credit back in August as just because … for my troubles. I’ll call that as us being ahead by $8.45.

And yes, I will call them to document that my understanding is accurate. I want to make sure that we will continue to get that $11.67. Otherwise that will be the second phone they swindled us out of the full credit. I’m not going to let that happen. Also we’ll damn sure never ever trade in a phone again. I’ll do what my buddy in real life suggested, wait for the sales to buy the phone outright. Specials come around often, for sure they’ll be a bargain during the holidays. Doh! isn’t that what started all of this?!?? lol

As always, more to come.