Today, Shannon and I got a bill from RCN for cable and phone service — which struck me as odd, being that our account with RCN was for the services we received in Brookline, Massachusetts, and we cancelled that account as of June 30th. In investigating why we got the bill, I learned that RCN has “a backlog of discontinuation requests,” and as a result, a tech isn’t even scheduled to turn off our services until this coming weekend — more than five weeks after the date we cancelled them and moved out of the house. And RCN’s practice is to continue billing for services until they’re actually turned off, even though they know that you don’t still live there, and that you aren’t receiving the benefits of the services. (Hell, they’re billing us for phone service — local, regional, and long-distance service, call waiting, and caller ID — even though our old phone number is now answered with a forwarding announcement.) Better still, RCN owes us a balance, but says that their policy is to pay that balance only after the service is actually disconnected, even if the delay in disconnection is their fault, and even then “within one to two billing cycles.” And if I want to question this policy, I have to speak to someone in the billing department, coincidentally the only part of RCN that maintains 9-to-5 hours and thus wasn’t there when I got home after work and got the bill.

It’s amazing to me how most service providers these days don’t try to maintain even the thinnest veneer of being ethical or reasonable in their business practices. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but there’s little doubt in my mind that problems like this aren’t unforeseen consequences of tangentially-related business decisions, but rather are conscious choices made with the explicit knowledge that a certain percentage of customers will continue to pay the illegitimate bills (either mistakenly or as a result of not having the energy or time to fight them). In this instance, I’m fortunate (or RCN is unfortunate) that Brookline has an ombudsman who’s specifically tasked with monitoring the city’s contracts with cable companies and solving the problems experienced by residents. I guess I’ll be wasting a bit more time on this tomorrow…