W - T - F ?!?!?
mood: 
infuriated
infuriatedI just got called by a company about a magazine subscription. They were claiming that I said yes to 5 x 1-year magazine subscriptions for the bargain basement price of...
12 easy payments of
$49.95
my response = KISS MY ASS!!!!
Who in their right (or for that matter wrong) mind would pay $599.40 for 60 magazines? They were trying to be slick to. Asking for my banking information so that they could electronically bill me each month for only $49.95. It's funny because I was just telling my folks that I think it's important to be polite to people who work in call centers (e.g. taking orders, doing customer service etc...) but that I was increasingly impatient with folks who seemed to be out to rip people off. I mean really, how can someone spend their day calling person after person for this kind of scam? The end of the conversation went something like this:
Me: "So what exactly are you saying that I agreed to?"
Shithead: "Paying a monthly fee of $49.95"
Me: "For how long?"
Shithead:" It will only be for 12 Months"
Me: "What!?!?
Me: "No. I have never agreed to pay almost $600.00 dollars for magazines. Heck, I only read 2 or 3 different ones"
Shithead:" Well you agreed to pay this."
Me: "No I didn't."
Shithead: "You'll only be paying for the magazines that you're already getting"
Me: "I am not getting 5 magazine subscriptions."
Shithead: "You're not?"
Me: "No.
Shithead: "Oh....... <click>"
Normally I'd be a bit miffed and just laugh it off as a lame scheme, but what pissed me off is that I'm a bit on edge with all the work crap and family crap and just plain nervousness about the house etc... Right now is not a good time to fuck with me. To quote the geat Mr. Samuel L. Jackson "Oh, you're ready to explode? You're ready to expode? Well I'm a mushroom cloud laying mutherfucker, motherfucker"
Gah. I need to go out and relax. Ta-ta.
Re:
but now you can point and laugh at him on behalf of both of us :)
However to be honest, I might have said "sure" at some point in the beginning. I'm pretty sure they are the ones that called me up one Saturday morning at like 6am and stupid me I answered and tried to hold an intelligent conversation at that hour. Fortunately, I'm a die-hard believer in "bill me for it" and only letting very specific trustworthy groups muck around with my accounts. I think only my insurance company (my family has been with the same agent since a little bit before I was born... now he's going to insure my house... he must be feeling old ;), the gym, and my student loans come directly out of my bank account. Everyone else must wait for me to send them a check.
The whole "electronic draft" thing was what really made me suspicious because they were being very evasive about the total cost of the deal (and I'm pretty sure someone lied and said it was under $100) and they were being very pushy in later calls. I keep thinking that I must have sounded like Chris Tucker in Rush Hour when I figured out how much the total was:
"Fifty million dollars? Who'd you kidnap Chelsea Clinton?
Re:
I'm glad you didn't get ripped off though. Maybe not all direct-marketers are running scams, but it seems like an awful lot of them are.
I usually just ignore scams, but this one was persistent enough to make me want to do something about it (they calles several times about this stuff)