Everything in Particular

The title of this article implies I will be giving multiple examples of my bad experiences with Qwest. While it’s true that I have had two phenomenally bad experiences with Qwest, I will only be going into detail on my most recent experience with them. I chose this title instead of something like “Qwest Has Really Bad Customer Service” because I also don’t want to infer that noone can have a good experience with Qwest.

A little bit of history

In 2001 I had a terrible customer service experience with Qwest over DSL which I will not be going into. It’s worth mentioning up front however because it was an experience sufficiently bad as to cause me to never want to do business with their company again. Qwest is really the only company I have ever felt so strongly about an experience I have had with them as to never want to be a customer of theirs again.

Fast forward to February 2009…

While making a visit to my parent’s house my mom remembered a piece of mail she received recently with my name on it and went to retrieve it. When she returned she presented an envelope addressed to me but at my parent’s address. I further noticed that the sender was “Qwest”. Remembering my bad experience with Qwest in 2001 I announced that I really was not interested in anything they were trying to sell me and, wondering out loud why they would send me mail to my parent’s address, set it aside without opening it.

A few weeks later my mom informed me that another piece of mail had arrived at their home for me from Qwest and that, being overcome with worry, she opened it. “It’s a bill”, she told me. Thoroughly confused I looked at the bill. The account number “8019690680″ appeared prominently displayed on the bill. Undoubtedly a phone number I figured although, racking my brain, I could not recall ever having a phone with that number. I thought all the way back to when I was still willing to use Qwest as a service provider and tried to recall having any phone number, other than my current, set up in my name. I tried hard to remember but could not recall the phone number I had for a cell phone I bought for a 1-year stint in 2000 but was pretty sure Qwest didn’t offer cell service back then and… oh yeah, that was a voicestream account. Stumped, I decided I would give them a call to find out what was going on.

Within a few days I was on the phone calling to figure out how they had unintentionally sent a bill for a different David Brinton to my parent’s address. I thought that perhaps they had a second David Brinton as a customer and had lost track of that David’s address information. Then, scouring their old records, they found my account from 2001 when I still lived with my parents? The woman on the other end of the phone didn’t know where the account had come from either. She told me it was set up December 8th but that if it was a mistake she would “take care of everything”. She also tried to convince me that “Qwest was different now” and that I “should try us again”. She was incredibly accommodating and I felt a lot better about the situation when the phone call was over. (I wonder if she is paid on commission?)

It wasn’t many weeks later that I received another bill. I ignored this one because after all I was told it had been “all taken care of”. I reassured my mom that the problem was resolved and that she didn’t need to worry about any more bills; That, internal bureaucracy and the delay in the mail system was the reason they hadn’t stopped yet. A few weeks later another bill came so I called Qwest again. This time the individual I spoke to indicated that nothing had been done about my request a few months earlier and that this time I had nothing further to concern myself with and that now it would all be taken care of. My mom also called on my behalf during this time and she was told something similar. In spite of being a little wary from the broken promise of my last interaction with Qwest, I still felt confident enough to trust their word on this one. After all both individuals I talked to were supremely confident that the situation would be easily resolved. Certainly the first time was just a fluke.

Well some more time went by where we played the same game as before, waiting for the bills to stop coming. And of course they never did, but honestly I was content to let it all continue like this until resolution. I did not expect what Qwest would do next.

Summer of 09 the interest rates dropped to a phenomenal low. My loan agent contacted me via email telling me if I acted right away I could get a 4.7% loan. Our loan at the time was \

somewhere in the sixes and calculations showed the drop in interest rate would save us more than $200 / month and something like $170,000 over the loan life. We told him to pull the trigger on that rate and he went to work on a loan for us. A few hours later he contacted me with bad news. My usually great credit was not so great right now. When I asked what was affecting it he told me it was a bill that had been sent to a collection agency by Qwest.

For me this is where it all turned ugly. They definitely crossed the line here. My credit was being affected by some entity I have spent the last 7 years avoiding doing business with? What gives them the right or power to affect my life like this in such an impactful way? I’m not even a willing customer! At this point it really felt to me as though my rights had been violated in some way. I called to talk to Qwest again, this time they weren’t quite so optimistic about my problem being resolved, or quite so pleasant to talk to. They informed me over the phone that the fraud department of Qwest had investigated the situation, but that they had determined independently that there was no fraud committed and that the balance stands. When I asked to talk to the fraud department I was told that was impossible. The only thing the person on the phone could tell me was what the fraud department’s findings were. They could do nothing else for me. Insisting I talk to a supervisor I got the same story from them. Also, since the collection on the account had been turned over to a collection agency I had to talk to them to get it resolved.

The collection agency

The first collection agency I called had turned the account over to a second, smaller collection agency that sounded like it had exactly 3 people working there. The people were nice enough to work with but they were really frustrating because noone really knew how to do anything except collect money. Whereas I had questions like “how do I get this blemish off my credit”. Finally, feeling as though I had no other short-term choice, and with the inference from the side of the collection agency that once paid the item would be removed from my credit, I paid the bill in its entirety. A bill for an account I never opened. A bill for an account I never used, and never knew existed. An account that was opened by Qwest on my behalf without my knowledge or permission.

Finally, I thought, I would be able to move forward with my loan. I called the loan officer and found out what else needed to be done. He told me I needed a letter from the collection agency indicating the offending information would be removed from my credit. Over the next few weeks we tried getting letters, faxes anything from the collection agency. They had no idea what I needed and when they would attempt to fax information saying it was paid in full it never made it to its destination. Sparing you all a lot of boring details, it turns out the collection agency will only remove the item from my credit immediately if the account was successfully disputed. Well, I didn’t dispute it because I was led to believe that going this route would resolve the situation more quickly. I guess it turns out, it only resolves the situation for Qwest.

Back to the Qwest side of things

Meanwhile, of course, since I never opened the account in the first place, I was still pursuing an ongoing dispute with Qwest. Since I couldn’t talk to anyone in their fraud department and the people I could talk to were of no help, I was told my only outlet was to mail, yes mail a written dispute to their corporate office. I chocked this up to them wanting to throw as many barriers in my way to prevent a dispute from going through. This seemed to me like a very crooked way of doing business. While it seems they were within their rights to require a dispute be submitted in this way, they clearly were not trying to make things easy on me. If it were someone less principled, or if the account was only for $50 or so Qwest would get away with this type of theft. If this is a common problem with Qwest (and folks I have talked to at the Public Service Commission have implied that it is) they could acquire hundreds of thousands of unearned dollars each year. Which is just another way to say they could psuedo-legally steal hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

The written dispute went unanswered. I can assume it triggered another fraud investigation but noone at Qwest contacted me to tell me they had received the letter, nor did anyone contact me to tell me of any investigation results. Finally feeling at the end of my rope I started to consider legal action. It felt awkward even considering the idea because I don’t like what the legal system has become to many Americans. It seems every other month you hear about someone suing because they burned themselves on some coffee, but I didn’t feel I had any other recourse. Of course the bill in question is for $180 or so which is small change but being out $180 wasn’t what had really affected me so much. I was much more affected by the $200/month I won’t ever see now or the $4000 it would take to buy my rate down if I closed now. I don’t like the idea of getting something for nothing or the expectation a lot of people have now of entitlement but to me Qwest had taken something away that they had no right to take away and were not only willing to try to resolve the problem but were intentionally being difficult about it.

Legal action?

I decided to call prepaid legal as it seemed like the least expensive outlet for finding out if I had any recourse for the way I had been wronged by Qwest. Of course taking legal action is somewhat of a gamble. It can cost you a lot of money if you don’t win and so before doing anything in the courts the attorney I talked to recommended I call the Public Service Commission. I called them right after I got off the phone with the attorney.

Public service commisison

This is the stage in the process that I am at currently. Getting help from the Public Service Commission has been extremely simple. I called them and within 5 minutes I had a dispute against Qwest set up. They informed me that Qwest would be contacting me within 5 days to let me know the outcome of their new investigation.

Qwest’s executive offices

Well calling the Public Service Commission certainly got Qwest’s attention. When I first got the call from Qwest and the woman on the other side purported to be from the executive offices I must have gone on for a full minute about how grateful I was that I was finally able to talk to someone from Qwest that had the authority to talk to me about the problem. The conversation I had with this woman, however, leads me to believe calling the Public Service Commission to try to get a resolution had only annoyed them and they were only calling me back as some legal requirement.

She agreed to hear my side but interrupted frequently to tell me that the conversation was over and she wasn’t going to close the account and repay my money. I don’t think I finished getting even 1/2 of my story out. About 5 minutes into the call she was trying to end it. Clearly, I thought, she was trying to get out of the office to go to lunch with some friends or something.

In a nutshell here are her reasons for not resolving the issue in my favor:

1. If this was really an account you didn’t want why did it take you so long to call to resolve it? … Ummmm, I didn’t know about it? You sent the mail to an address where I don’t live?
2. That the relationship she has with her son would never have allowed a month to go by before she gave him the mail. … Ok?
3. That because they have my social security number that logically it follows I opened the account. … What!?
4. That the service was used. … Not technically possible, my parent’s have never owned a two-line phone.

This is basically where I am at in this process. My next step is to call back the Public Service Commission on Monday to hear the official report they received from Qwest. I’m writing this so that noone I know will become a Qwest customer without knowing this about them and that hopefully it will dissuade at least one person from doing business with them.

I have left out a few details because I’m not much of a writer and I don’t really enjoy it .