It's very smart slogan/tagline T-Mobile uses, if you ask me - Stick Together. It sends up visions in your head a company that stands by its customers. In my case, it was just a little different; it was more like Stick 'em Up. At the first sign of summer, I made arrangements for a brief four-day holiday in the Bahamas. My hotel happened to be in a dead spot for signal coverage though, and I left my T Mobile phone safely tucked away in my luggage. Not so safely as it turned out; I didn't use my phone for the entire duration of my trip, and I only looked for it when I got to the airport back home. It wasn't an expensive model though, and I thought I wouldn't really miss it. Was I ever wrong.
Whoever stole it, must be a remarkably friendly person, for when I inquired about my bill, I found that he (or she) had charged up about $800 to my plan, calling up numbers all over the world. I'd never paid attention to what might happen to my bill if someone else got control of my phone. Foolishly, I always assumed that they'd have something in place like a credit card does. If they see that your usage pattern is out of the ordinary all of a sudden, they raise a red flag. My average build never crosses $50 usually; wouldn't they want to do something when all of a sudden, I was using up something like 16 times what was normal for me? The T Mobile phone company said they were not responsible for my carelessness, and they demanded that I pay. I began to investigate to see if there was anything I could do here.
Actually, this thing happens to so many people, they have an actual phrase for it - Bill shock. In Europe, people are so fed up with this kind of thing that is they have forced their legislators to require mobile phone companies to cut off service once a user reacher a certain unnatural level (Incidentally, did you know that the T Mobile phone company has its headquarters in Germany?). I was a little gratified to hear that I wasn't the only one. Have you read about that Verizon phone owner who canceled his unlimited data plan, and didn't tell his son? The son used his father's mobile to surf the Net on his laptop for like a month, and his father got a bill for nearly $20,000. Verizon was kind enough to forgive the entire bill when the father went public with the story.
The FCC just found out that about one out of five of all mobile phone users in this country have experienced an unexpected situation like this. And almost all of them report that the company never contacted them when they overran their limit or even used their phone in unnatural ways. There are a few providers in this country who do voluntarily offer you this service, but it's quite a rarity. As for the T Mobile phone that was the cause of my problem, the company says I could have always kept up with my usage levels on the company's website. But how was I to know someone stole my phone it was having a good time talking to his friend in the Fiji three hours a day? Thankfully, the FCC is going to be introducing legal measures to make sure all mobile companies put bill shock measures in place. But for me, a simple threat that I would go to the papers with my story convinced T-Mobile to see reason after all. I got my bill excused.