{"id":963,"date":"2022-11-01T10:52:28","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T14:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/?p=963"},"modified":"2023-11-26T07:43:56","modified_gmt":"2023-11-26T12:43:56","slug":"963","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/2022\/11\/01\/963\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to the abusive ex"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was <a href=\"\/blogs\/glab\/2018\/10\/13\/one-big-act-four-bigger-effects\/#comments\">hopeful<\/a> that leaving Rogers would be good.<\/p>\n<p>Nope. Distributel was horrible. After about a year, the piece-of-junk SMART\/RG cable-modem they sent started randomly rebooting every a few times a month for a couple of months, then it started randomly rebooting a few times a week, then per day, then per hour. Eventually, it got to the point where it would reboot before it even finished re-connecting. I wasted many hours on the phone with them, trying to get them to accept that it&#8217;s defective and their useless &#8220;diagnostic&#8221; steps wouldn&#8217;t fix a hardware problem. After three weeks of suffering with it, they finally agree to send a replacement. They send the same model. After about a year, the exact same problem.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, they kept raising the price every few months, completely ignoring the &#8220;contract&#8221;, just like Rogers would do. Every time I had to call and get them to make a new deal\/bundle, but they would always keep randomly increasing it every now and then.<\/p>\n<p>After the third year, I couldn&#8217;t convince them to give any discounts or bundles or deals or anything. I argued with them about their garbage prices and trash website that shows a fake price they don&#8217;t actually charge. They said it&#8217;s only for new customers. I said their site ONLY shows that price and no &#8220;regular price&#8221;. They didn&#8217;t acknowledge their fraud. I said maybe I should cancel my services and maybe consider coming back in a few years as new customer. \ud83d\ude12<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, I happened to see an ad in the newspaper about Rogers&#8217; &#8220;Connected for Success&#8221; program for low-income people. I contacted them and was approved. I called Distributel to cancel EVERYTHING. They put up a fight but I told them to go to hell.<\/p>\n<p>Rogers said they couldn&#8217;t transfer my old landline phone-number for a few days (I guess there&#8217;s a delay until it&#8217;s de-registered from Distributel). They said they could install the Internet on Monday. They also said I would HAVE to get the TV service to get the home-phone for some BS reason. All of Rogers&#8217; services are Internet now, the Internet is obviously, their home-phone always was VoIP, and now, even their TV service isn&#8217;t cable, it&#8217;s Internet-TV. There was no reason I needed the TV to get home-phone, it&#8217;s just their typical fraud garbage. \ud83d\ude20<\/p>\n<p>I had no Internet at all on the weekend (technically, the Distributel Internet and phone were still working for three weeks after they were supposed to disconnect them; just more examples of their incompetence\u2014fortunately they didn&#8217;t charge me past the cancellation date).<\/p>\n<p>They came and installed the Internet and TV on Monday. The TV service was worthless. It&#8217;s a small PVR box which only has HDMI, so I couldn&#8217;t connect it to the CRT TV, and I need the HDMI TV as my computer monitor. I tried connecting it to the laptop through an HDMI-USB adapter, but the cheap Chinese junk was awful, so it wasn&#8217;t useful. Worse, there were ZERO channels worth watching. Getting ANY channels worth watching would have incurred huge extra charges.<\/p>\n<p>Wednesday came and went and I didn&#8217;t call to follow up to get the old phone-number. Eventually, it was too late. Someone else probably has it now. I have no idea how many people and places have the old number we had for the past 25 years. I don&#8217;t even know who to update. The pharmacy didn&#8217;t call when my prescription was ready because they had the old number.<\/p>\n<p>After wasting money, paying double the bill I was expecting for two months, I called Rogers and cancelled the TV service. I returned the TV box on the day that Rogers had their second country-wide Internet outage in 1.5 years. \ud83d\ude12<\/p>\n<p>I accidentally paid that double-sized bill twice. I keep doing that, I schedule bill payments, not noticing I already did it for that month; I usually catch it in time, but Rogers slipped through. I didn&#8217;t have to pay again for 3.5 months.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I just need to get insurance that ISN&#8217;T 4.5\u00d7 what I should be paying and maybe I can start saving money again. \ud83d\ude20<\/p>\n<p>I feel like a battered woman who went back to her abuser, but that&#8217;s how it is in North America. \ud83e\udd26<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was hopeful that leaving Rogers would be good. Nope. Distributel was horrible. After about a year, the piece-of-junk SMART\/RG cable-modem they sent started randomly rebooting every a few times a month for a couple of months, then it started randomly rebooting a few times a week, then per day, then per hour. Eventually, it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/glab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}