By Myrtle Mortbrain
JOTR Consumerist
I just don’t get it.
All this gobbledygook from JOTR readers who say they’ve been bilked by their ATT bills.
Know what I mean?
Just like the NRA says, “Guns don’t kill people.”
Well, you can quote old Myrtle on this one: Bills don’t bilk people.
I mean, don’t they READ their bills?
Here at JOTR, we read EVERYTHING that comes in the mail. Oh, it’s true that our founder let slip a bill from ATT and later discovered he’d paid for some services he didn’t order.
His fault, I say!
(One nice thing about working for JOTR — they may not pay, but they leave your copy alone.)
Anyway, now the boss is carping that some phony signed him up with a wrong e-mail and fictitious birth date. It was a fake birth date that made him out to be 28 instead of 65.
SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Be grateful for small favors, is what I say. Some anonymous benefactor carves 32 years off his age, and the boss is pitching a bitch?
Some people just don’t know a good deal when they’ve got it.
So what if all these phony charges added up to $58.37 a month out of JOTR’s bank account? He got 32 years younger, and at a very low cost, in my view.
Okay, seriously, people, you need to take responsibility — read those bills!
I agree with what the flak from ILD Teleservices told the boss:
Like any bill, it’s important to closely review your phone bill each and every month because whether it’s your phone bill, credit card statement, electric or cable, sometimes charges end up on your bill that you should question. Your phone bill should be treated like any other purchase you make, so take a few minutes each month and closely review all of the charges, just like you do with your bank statement and credit card statements.
Think of it as a test — the shysters screwing you are not bad people. No, they are put on earth to make sure good people stay alert. If the good folks slip up and get screwed out of their savings, whose fault is it?
Theirs!
It’s a dog-eat-dog world where the bad people have a right, nay, a duty, to test good people by screwing them to make them wise up.
If they’d don’t get savvy, well, that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?
If they forget to check their phone bill with a microscope because they got busy auditing their credit bills per the ILD Teleservices honcho’s advice, whose fault is that? So what if they assumed that ATT would bill only for ATT charges and not act like a front for these fly-by-nights? You mean you trusted ATT?
Ladies and gentlemen, have we not learned from Goldman Sachs, AIG and all the other huge corporations that gaming the system means gaming you and me?
We have only ourselves to blame!
(By adopting this blame-the-victim stance, frankly, I make my own job of writing a consumer-protection column much easier. If there’s no point in protecting consumers, if victims are the ones to blame, no point doing the hard research and sticking my neck out to snipe at the perps, right?)
I rather like the attitude of that PR person for ILD Teleservies, the one that almost got my boss’s pocketbook: Read those bills, dumbies!
It’s every man and woman, boy, girl, cat and dog for him, her or itself.
And that’s about all for now from this consumer advocate, whose supreme advice to all victims of chicanery, skullduggery and hoodlumism is: Get smart or pay the price.
