<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>illumin8</author><text>The quickest way to resolve all of these billing shenanigans: file a consumer complaint with the FCC.  Magically, you&amp;#x27;ll almost immediately get a phone call from someone fairly high up in the company (typically executive relations or similar) that has the power to fix things and will make it right.&lt;p&gt;The sad truth is that these telcos will systematically screw millions of customers with shady fees and fraudulent billing practices, but when the FCC gets involved, they are facing potential fines of tens of thousands for each infraction, so they&amp;#x27;ll bend over backwards to get you to drop the complaint.&lt;p&gt;Try it sometime, it sucks that it&amp;#x27;s necessary, but you&amp;#x27;d be amazed at the results.</text><parent_chain><item><author>xahrepap</author><text>CenturyLink is totally shady. My wife just yesterday spent a significant amount of time fixing our phone bill. She decided a couple months ago to upgrade to a &amp;quot;fixed&amp;quot; bill plan (apparently they&amp;#x27;ve been raising our prices $10&amp;#x2F;mo every year for the last few years). This plan price won&amp;#x27;t change until we change the plan. It&amp;#x27;s bundled with their internet though, but my wife told them to not send the modem because we weren&amp;#x27;t going to be using it and didn&amp;#x27;t want to be charged for it.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward to yesterday and we had a modem in the mail a $200+ bill for our landline that should be &amp;lt;$60. She called and the guy on the other end was very helpful (surprisingly). He went through the bill line-by-line and almost every time said something to the extent of, &amp;quot;Why is that here?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m going to have to talk to {previous sales lady who &amp;#x27;upgraded&amp;#x27; us}&amp;quot;. Some of the items he didn&amp;#x27;t even know what they were and couldn&amp;#x27;t remove them, so he instead gave us a permanent $10&amp;#x2F;mo discount or whatever it was billing.&lt;p&gt;About the modem, he said, &amp;quot;You can keep it or mail it back. I can make a note on our software that you didn&amp;#x27;t want it and it shouldn&amp;#x27;t bill you for it. However, I recommend you mail it back because sometimes that note will disappear from our software and start charging you again&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Wait... what!? Did he just acknowledge what some of us has suspected all along? That their software has intentional &amp;quot;bugs&amp;quot; that don&amp;#x27;t remember to stop billing someone for something?&lt;p&gt;The whole thing feels like a scam to me. I don&amp;#x27;t trust them at all. This isn&amp;#x27;t the first time and won&amp;#x27;t be the last either.&lt;p&gt;The reason we haven&amp;#x27;t canceled? No other traditional landline offerings in our area. Everything is VOIP or Cell. My wife wants something independent for emergencies. She&amp;#x27;s starting to question the value of it all though.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to</title><url>https://www.richsnapp.com/blog/2018/12-13-centurylink-blocking-internet-in-utah</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>wlesieutre</author><text>A friend of mine signed up for them on a promo, got charged 3x the price he was supposed to, then was told “We didn’t apply the promo, but that’s only for new customers and you’re a customer now so we won’t fix it.”&lt;p&gt;Thankfully he lives in one of the few places with multiple providers, so he told them to stuff it.</text><parent_chain><item><author>xahrepap</author><text>CenturyLink is totally shady. My wife just yesterday spent a significant amount of time fixing our phone bill. She decided a couple months ago to upgrade to a &amp;quot;fixed&amp;quot; bill plan (apparently they&amp;#x27;ve been raising our prices $10&amp;#x2F;mo every year for the last few years). This plan price won&amp;#x27;t change until we change the plan. It&amp;#x27;s bundled with their internet though, but my wife told them to not send the modem because we weren&amp;#x27;t going to be using it and didn&amp;#x27;t want to be charged for it.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward to yesterday and we had a modem in the mail a $200+ bill for our landline that should be &amp;lt;$60. She called and the guy on the other end was very helpful (surprisingly). He went through the bill line-by-line and almost every time said something to the extent of, &amp;quot;Why is that here?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m going to have to talk to {previous sales lady who &amp;#x27;upgraded&amp;#x27; us}&amp;quot;. Some of the items he didn&amp;#x27;t even know what they were and couldn&amp;#x27;t remove them, so he instead gave us a permanent $10&amp;#x2F;mo discount or whatever it was billing.&lt;p&gt;About the modem, he said, &amp;quot;You can keep it or mail it back. I can make a note on our software that you didn&amp;#x27;t want it and it shouldn&amp;#x27;t bill you for it. However, I recommend you mail it back because sometimes that note will disappear from our software and start charging you again&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Wait... what!? Did he just acknowledge what some of us has suspected all along? That their software has intentional &amp;quot;bugs&amp;quot; that don&amp;#x27;t remember to stop billing someone for something?&lt;p&gt;The whole thing feels like a scam to me. I don&amp;#x27;t trust them at all. This isn&amp;#x27;t the first time and won&amp;#x27;t be the last either.&lt;p&gt;The reason we haven&amp;#x27;t canceled? No other traditional landline offerings in our area. Everything is VOIP or Cell. My wife wants something independent for emergencies. She&amp;#x27;s starting to question the value of it all though.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to</title><url>https://www.richsnapp.com/blog/2018/12-13-centurylink-blocking-internet-in-utah</url></story>