Slashdot Mirror
Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!
An anonymous reader writes "PC World Senior Editor Tom Spring signed up for 32 online accounts. Then tried to cancel all of them. The most difficult to cancel: NetZero. The easiest to cancel: Consumer Reports Online and The New York Times TimesSelect. His experience was rated on a number of criteria, and highlights the hoops that commercial enterprises put in place to keep their 'customers'. From the article: 'I had a hard time canceling my $5 monthly Gold Classmates.com account, too. I couldn't find any information on how to cancel until I entered the word cancel In the site's search engine. Classmates.com spokesperson John Uppendahl confirmed that there is no other way to find cancellation information. But that was only the first hoop I had to jump through to cancel my membership. Classmates.com also forced me to click through several Web pages reminding me of the benefits I'd lose. Finally my clicking ended at a generic Member Support e-mail contact page containing a blank 'Your Question' field. Though the form said nothing about cancellations, I used it to request that the service cancel my subscription. The next day I received an e-mail message confirming that the service had accepted my request.'"
This is precisely why I use virtual CC numbers. My bank (MBNA, now bought by B of A) allows me to set a limit on the amount of money that can be used, and the expiration date is usually two months in the future. A few companies (most recently Time Magazine) have tried the old trick "Submit a new card number to ensure uninterrupted service", but the truth is, they know that as long as they have a valid CC number they are in a much stronger position.
On a different thread, I personally found Paypal to be the hardest to cancel. The link is buried deep in the Options menu, good luck finding it, aunt Mary.
I had a NetZero account some time ago, as a dial-up account to use when I traveled. (This was before all the hotels started offering wi-fi.) The funny thing is that I didn't cancel it, instead they canceled it on me... When my credit card number changed (twice), they only attempted to contact me via my NetZero email account - which of course I never looked at. The first time the card number changed I happened to discover it and fixed the problem, asking them to contact me at a different email if it happened again; the second time, I didn't notice and they never tried.
Back when I canceled my Vonage account some 2 years ago, it took a 2 hour hold time, plus mailing their hardware back at my expense to cancel.
Plus now I get monthly "Come back to Vonage and save!" letters in the mail that I can use for kindling. I guess he hasn't gotten his first letter yet.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What makes these companies think that this will make them money?
Whenever I encounter a situation like this (where cancelling is made a pain in the ass), I vow to never again use the service, and to tell anyone I know about what a crappy company it is.
I have actually returned to companies that did not make my life difficult in this way. Sometimes, you just don't need the service. Maybe you will be a return customer. But when they do this crap, they piss people off. They ensure that you will NEVER return and that you will do everything you can to spread the word about what a worthless company they are.
If me girlfriend wants to have sex, she strokes my cock 3 times. If she doesn't want to have sex, she strokes my cock 100 times.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's interesting that he mentions Consumer Reports as the easy to cancel. When I was buying a car a few years ago, I signed up with them to read reviews and advice. Their term was a year. After I bought my car (a month or two after I signed up), I canceled the account and was credited the pro-rated cost of the time I did not use. It was so easy and honest that I couldn't believe it was really going to work. After it was done, I felt a little bad for canceling service with a company that got something so right from a customer point of view, even when it costs them money.
Unless you expect nobody to ever cancel your paid services, then why should there be a fee to this? With all that work it should be well scripted out and never require administrator level input. If it does then the programmers really fouled up. I should never be charged because the company was to incompetent. If you want people to pay you should provide them with the ability to stop paying nicely, sans fee.
MSN Internet was on the list. They scored as "Big Hassle"
Here is the Big Hassle list:
* AOL
* BlueMountain.com
* Classmates.com
* ESPN
* MSN Internet
* Napster.com
* NetZero
* Real Rhapsody
* Real SuperPass
* True.com
I call bollocks on that. Any system worth its salt runs all that as a single (and fairly atomic) script the instant the UID is removed from the user database. I've built systems where the opposite is the case, we had to add several levels of confirm for an operator to remove an account because the cleanup was so thorough that the moment you hit that return key the final time... boom, no going back. It's also safer that way because removing every service separately by hand leaves far more room for error. Cancellation charges are just extortion. And besides they should be incorporated into the monthly fees, asking a customer to PAY to cancel is just damned immoral.
The worst account I ever tried to cancel was (don't laugh I know this is Slashdot) a gym membership. I basically had to order my bank to cease paying
them under pain of closing the bank account and have a lawyers letter sent to the company. The still send me a reminder as a "special valued customer you can come back for 50% monthly discount". I send the letters back without return postage and they still send more.
Apparently, they differentiate between cancellation, resignation, and suspension, so that they have a 66% chance of keeping your money. And if you ask your credit card company to stop charges, they can fine you $1000 It's all in the contract....
I signed up for the free .Mac trial when I got my Mac. While I didn't get charged anything when I didn't sign up, my .Mac account is still buried within Mac OS X and it pops up from time to time when attempting to configure stuff (iChat, Mail, etc.).
.Mac account. When I didn't renew it, I set up another iTunes account. So I have a bunch of songs purchased with one account and a bunch of songs purchased with another account. This sometimes confuses iTunes and a batch of songs are unplayable until I reauthorize my computer with one of the accounts.
iTunes is the more entertaining one. When I set up my iTunes account, it filled in my
(This is why I laugh whenever some MacHead tells me about how they "buy" their music rather than "rent" it. Cancel your iTunes account and see what happens to those songs you "bought".)
It literally took me 2 hours on the phone to cancel this service. And an hour and a half of that was actually talking to a real live person.
Unbelievable. It probably cost the company $50 in salary, social security, benefits, and phone usage to delay me canceling the service, all for possibly me getting frustrated and waiting 1 more month to cancel the $10 service.
I learned my lesson though. Next time I had to cancel an insurance policy, I simply told them "I've talked to you for 10 minutes. You have confirmed my identity. Cancel my account or I will chargeback any charges to my credit card ".
Seems to work ok, most of the time.
Clearly no one is within their rights to dispute authorized charges. That's the whole point of a chargeback -- it's to charge back unauthorized charges.
You can't sign away your right to dispute unauthorized charges. For example, VISA's Chargeback Guidelines (PDF) specifically address this:
BTW, reading the VISA document above is well worth time. It's useful for those checkout line arguments you invariably find yourself in occasionally. (minimum charges, ID checks, etc.)
Personally I just change my bank account once a month. Changing your address once a month helps with the other bills. If you are still having trouble with companies that won't stop billing you for cancelled services just change your name and social security number monthly. If all else fails changing the country you live in monthly is a sure fire cure to billing woes. What if you run out of countries? No problem there are new ones every year. Seems a lot of countries like to change their name too.
A few years back when I was hooked on Halo 2 I signed up for Xbox Live with one of those 3-month free cards you got with certain games. I didn't have a credit card at the time to register the account with so I called my parents and used their CC info. Towards the end of the 3 months I decided to cancel the account, so I called the customer service and they told me that the account would not renew once it had expired. I had even received a confirmation e-mail regarding the closure of the account, a few months later I got a call from my mother telling me that they were still charging her credit card every month. So after calling the customer service again they said that they needed to get confirmation from the person who the account was registered to, which surprisingly somehow was not me. Somehow the account had gotten my little brother's name on it and they insisted that they needed to get his confirmation before they would close the account. My brother at the time was 13 years old and I had to have my mother call up and put my brother on the phone to give the ok just to cancel the subscription. I've dealt with Xbox Live since and had no problems with canceling though so they seem to have fixed their problems.
- We try to go to their site, looking for "cancel subscriptions". We search "cancel" and they have 2 links in their help page. But when I clicked on it, it shows nothing (both Firefox and IE 7)
- Then we try their web chat. First when I tell the web chat we are cancelling, they give me ANOTHER link for their support chat. Fine. AND THEN, when we try to use their chat, it's broken.
It starts to sound fishy to me up to this point...
- We then try to call their support line. It takes forever just to go through the phone menus, and then we were put on hold for 20 minutes. Finally, a guy with distinctly Indian accent answered the call. He did not speak English that, I have to guesstimate what he said. I have to basically just keep saying "I just need to cancel my subscription, no thanks." repeatedly to get him stop repeat the scripted answers.
Anyway... in the end this support guy said he'd give us a refund, but he'd put us on hold again to talk to the billing department. And finally he claimed the support department will refund us "in a few days". Oh yes, takes less than a day to charge the credit card, but a few days to refund...
In the end we spent half an hour to deal with the cancellation. You are free to call their support line, and then see how much time to get to their billing "department". Here is more efax horror stories. Don't ever try to use efax in your life time. You have been warned. How these companies manage to piss their customers is beyond me.I've dealt with very bad cancellation experiences in the past, myself. And this article surely proves that I'm not the only one having these problems. It's as if these companies and corporations don't have proper protocols or procedures for cancellation. Not being able to find information on cancelling a service on the provider's own website is totally pathetic. Or, having to call to cancel a service is also very sad in this age of computer technology.
Sadly, I think that it will remain like this for a very long time. These corporations know that if they retain their customers, they'll have more customers in the end. These companies don't care about bad reputations; they rely on their overly cheap and "amazing" deals to attract new customers. The Slashdot crowd is an intelligent and computer-savvy group of people. But the average consumer which signs up for these services might not be, and he might not care about the cancellation process, and he might be influenced by these exit interviews to stay.
Remember, corporations have access to great analytical data. If they continue to make hard cancellation processes, it means that there is profit to be made. That there are people who will stay because of the amount of labor required to cancel.
It's sad. I would really like these business practices to change. I, for once, will never make my hosting services hard to cancel because I believe in having a good reputation and I'm satisfied by the warm emails that I get from happy customers. I'm sure that other Slashdot users who provide some kind of service do the same.
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
I spent almost a year trying to get my bank to block some merchant from billing my card. I just could not get through to anyone over at this merchant who could / would stop billing me so I did it through the bank. Dozens of phone calls, several days of my time, half a dozen letters, a certified letter, a threat of a small claims lawsuit, and a letter to the CEO later, and they finally did block all those charges, for real. What a horrible payment system. The most important task for a bank is to keep people's money safe, which means being able to block unauthorized payments.
If some bank is really clever they will set up a web interface that lets you easily generate one-time-use or limited-use credit card numbers, or even physical credit cards (perhaps for a slight fee). The way it would work is you would say, "I want to create a new credit card, with these limitations: maximum billing of $50 per month." Then you give it to one particular on-line merchant, and when you want to stop service, you don't even deal with the merchant; you go straight to your bank web page, you select that particular generated CC number, and you click "cancel", and that is done.
Hello banks, this is not difficult! This would be such a great feature. If any bank offered that I would get an account with them and use only them for my on-line transactions.
From my experience; You can suspend billing of a Blockbuster Online account from the website itself. They won't bill you again, account remains open, and no futher dvds at sent to you. And you can reactivate billing to continue dvd mailings to you.
\
Simple... just throw yourself off of a building to cancel your Slashdot account. If you don't go splat, you didn't try hard enough. :P
Vonage was listed as "No hassle" but I found quite the contrary. You can only cancel over the phone, which runs from 9-5 EST Mon-Fri. This caused a pretty big problem considering I work 6am-4pm PST Mon-Fri (Its a Mill, work scheduled overtime weekly). I figured I could do it over my lunch break. But after calling the number they list to "cancel" I was bounced to another person, and found the waiting time to be over 45mins (at which time I had to head back to work).
Basically I had to wait a few weeks until we had some downtime due to an accident. After waiting almost on hour and a half on hold, the operator kept trying to talk me out of it. I finally convinced her when I said "I JUST WANT TO FUCKING CANCEL". It was silent for a moment and then she said "OK, its all done, have a nice day." I guess I may have just had a unique encounter, but Vonage for me was FAR from easy. They have 24 hour support, but can't have 24 hour cancellations... I wont ever be returning to them. Had it been painless, I probably would have returned to Vonage when I moved.
ServerPronto (if you don't know who they are, keep it that way), was a dedicated server host I used during the (I believe 2005) hurricane season that was active in Florida. I was worried when the hurricane came through, but I had no downtime, no nothing... until a month after the hurricane passed over. Then, the servers died, their support chat disappeared, no responses to email, and their number came up disconnected (yet I got a CC charge two days later). I called everyday for a week and emailed them for awhile before calling my CC company to dispute (for all of Bank of America's problems, they have a great dispute department). They had the same problems with disconnected numbers, so they found in my favor immediately and refunded my money. Two weeks later, mostly to ensure that the company wouldn't continue trying to charge me every month for what I assume was a company that had cut and run, I call and get through. I spoke to the most rude operator in the world at their company, who had the ***** to tell me that ServerPronto had not charged me money, and it went downhill from there before he hung up on me. He also told me that everything died when the hurricane hit, even though none of this had happened for a month after the storm blew over.
He hung up on me, I called back, and ended up speaking with a generic operator who told me no one with his name worked at the company. Needless to say, I did receive my money back from ServerPronto, and got a nice apology letter in the mail.
Almost forgot to mention that a check on their company in the BBB archives at that time revealed that their mailing address was for an office front only; their real operation is hidden away at a remote site.
Say what? You have to be kidding.
Cancelling an account should never take more than a few keystrokes and a button click. Maybe two clicks, the second one being a verification -- but if you've ever watched support handle confirmation screens, you know they aren't going to look at them anyway.
This is what admins are FOR: writing the backend code in the DB (and elsewhere) which ensures that, yes, when a user cancels their account, all traces of them are either removed, or the account is put into a 'hold' status if there are things like (as you said) e-mail addresses to worry about.
And no, there should NOT be cancellation charges on ANY service. Ever. None. Zero.
That is what long term contracts are for. If I say I want one year of service, then I pay for one year of service. Even if I cancel after a month. If the company offers me PART of my money back, cool! I think we are on the same page there in a way - a lot of people see a 50 dollar early termination fee as hideous, even though they are actually getting out of, say, 9 months of a 40 dollar per month service. I just despise situations where I *have* to sign a contract, and I have no power to negotiate and nobody else offers shorter terms.
And yes, I've been an admin at a company that had to deal with such. No, it wasn't shockingly difficult to create the system for dealing with this. Though, I admit it was made easier by the fact that, by law, we had to retain most of the information, and thus didn't have to do much more than null out CC#s and put the user in the inactive bin.
Personally, I'd like to see a law that states 'Cancelling may not be any more difficult than creating.' Four clicks to create? Four clicks to cancel. Big bold 'Create Account' button?... You get the idea. If you can create an account via the web, you can damned well figure out how to cancel one.
Anway, enough late night rambling,
I can vouch for this one. The hardest cancellation I've ever had to do was with Gold's Gym.
I had just moved back home from another state and wasn't sure how long I'd be here, so I specifically asked the salesperson about cancellation, I was told that it'd just be a $100 cancellation fee (even that is too much, but seemed reasonable at the time for some reason.) 6 months later, I tried to cancel only to find out that I have to show proof that I am moving more than X miles from any Gold's location, etc... They kept charging dues over the 3 months it took to cancel.
Then the 4th month rolled around and guess what? There was a glitch in their system and I was still billed for another month. Only after yelling && cussing out the phone for over 2 hours was I able to get a refund for that, and it took 6 weeks to arrive.
And this is exactly what a previous poster was talking about- not only will I never go back there- I will discourage everybody that I know is considering going there from signing up for their service. Crappy customer service, but they spend more on advertising than I do, so they'll probably win in the end. Fuck.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Coinky Dink? I don't think so.
Oh I'll give a shout out to Audible.com: every time I've had to ask them a question they've given me the benefit of the doubt and credited my account. Really good service.
The other day my US Postal carrier (mailwoman --but that would be an oxymoron) said to me, "I thought you moved --I'm getting all this mail from your address marked 'Return to Sender'(RTS)." I told her that, to teach these slimy junkmail-sending businesses a lesson, I was sending all their mail back. She said that any bulk mail marked "Presorted", which is most of them, is sent at a discounted rate that doesn't cover the cost of the RTS service; anything marked RTS is brought back to the mail processing plant and shredded. Ah, well. So the business never gets to see it. I guess I could still mark it RTS and get the US Post to shred it so I don't have to -- I don't like having recycled papers floating around in those public recycling dumps with my name and address on it -- but I guess I'm resigned to having to shred them myself.
With regard to credit card offers, you can tell the US credit rating companies that you don't want any more credit card offers. There's a phone number you can phone, and they ask you, "Do you mean stop sending credit card offers for 5 years, or permanently?"
At first I hesitated at permanently --what if I can't get more credit cards in the future even if I want to?-- but then I realized that I had successfully applied for one particular credit card without any solicitation. A friend told me about the good features --photo ID and signature printed on the card, 5% rebate on groceries and gasoline, 1% rebate on all else-- so I phoned and got approved. There was absolutely no downside to me being the one to take the initiative to contact them. In fact, only after I had gotten the card did I start getting offers from *that same bank* for all sorts of other cards. (Stupid bank, I just *got* a card from you! --why do I need more? Anyway, now that junk mail is blocked.)
If you sign up for "permanently", you have to send them something in writing. I did that, and my mailbox has been mercifully free of credit card offers for the past year or so. I'm too lazy to Google for it right now, so whoever wants to do it can probably get his/her post modded up.
As for the rest of the junk mail, I tried to ask my mailwoman to stop delivering them ("I just throw it away anyway," I told her) but apparently legally she is obligated to deliver it. There is a way to stop it, though; my wife tried it at her old address and apparently it worked.
It does like this: by law, you may order advertisers not to send you unsolicited mail if it is sexually provocative. But what is sexually provocative? The Supreme Court has upheld a decision that only YOU can determine whether something is sexually provocative to YOU. So, suppose you decide that the SuperSaver Coupons logo in your junk mail is sexually provocative to you. Who's to say it isn't? Your post office has no authority to decide that it isn't, so if you say it is, they must stop delivering that mail.
So, you can get this form from the post office that declares that you don't want the junk mail from that one particular source. You also need to bring a sample of the junk mail. My wife found it all on the web, so it's there, but again I'm too lazy to Google for it.
Hope that helps!
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I signed up for an eBay business account last month, and it got locked almost straight away. I was accused of listing a load of crappy items like fake-ish looking perfume and sports goods, a few days BEFORE I signed up.
After I cleared up the amazing time travelling junk listings, they admitted their dumb mistake but still wouldn't unlock the account. The only response was "We can't unlock the account because if we do then potential scammers will be able to optimize their scamming techniques. eBay works in mysterious ways" (Security though obscurity?)
Even though there was no money involved since I didn't actually list anything, I was pissed because of course I had given them all my personal info, as is necessary with eBay. They gave me the option of giving them even more ID to reactivate (then close) the account, or else boycott eBay forever.
A funny cancelling experience was when I tried to quit a UK ISP and the support guy asked me my password for a joke because it was about 60 random printable ASCII characters, and he wanted to see if I could recite it. I wasn't amused and asked why they didn't hash user passwords. Nice security guys.
Actually, I would categorize their options as cancellation and "everything else". The suspension is nothing but a scam to take advantage of people (including those who are tech-savvy like the author). Honestly, most people don't read through the TOS with a fine-toothed comb, nor do they expect to have to go through a million clicks.
Is it legal to have customers agree "not to dispute any charges by True.com or its authorized agents"? It seems like the RIAA's tactic where they force defendents to reveal the files that they supposedly shared illegally. Except in this case, True.com will claim every charge as "authorized" (although they probably deny this), therefore making it a catch-22.
I agree with you that True.com seems to be worse than NetZero. Not by much, but at least with NetZero, he did eventually cancel it. With True.com, he got nothing but threats and ridiculous policies.
Cancelling an AOL account is easy in my experience
Just call them, press 0 about a hundred times[1], and tell them you want to cancel your account. If they ask why you want to cancel your account, just be honest. If that's not good enough, start swearing. (I'm fucking tired of your assholes charging me twice what the local ISP charges...)
[1] The old business man trick. If you do it, you'll get better treatment from just about anyone.
After all, I am strangely colored.
It's not shocking that companies are doing this. It's very very intentional, as are the apologies and reluctant refunds. They know what they're doing, and it's a very good tactic to get every last drop of dirty money from unhappy customers.
Most people are lazy. They'll just say "oh well at least they won't bill me again" when they see a parting shot from something they cancelled. It's only $15, and my time is valuable i'm not going to sit on hold and talk to someone who doesn't speak english just for $15 right? So the company makes it as much of a hassle as they can, in order to keep an extra $15 here and there. I imagine if you tried 200 companies, at least %75 of them have a policy in place to do the exact same thing. They also have a policy to own up and apologize for it whenever they're caught, by explaining that it was a one-time thing and they're very very sorry and it won't happen again. AOL did it to me several times (it's like I'd have learned my lesson once, but noooooo. Never use AOL as temporary internet access while you're out of town. Free trials are rarely free).
The first place I heard of shady deals like this, of course, were the porn sites. You sign up for 30-days, but of course you're on a recurring billing immediately. If you're not careful, you're also sometimes agreeing to a multi-site pass that costs a lot more than you initially imagined! The porn sites are banking on the idea that you're not going to call visa and ask them to cancel a charge from a porn site at worst, and that you won't even notice the charge at best. If you find out, no problem they won't bill you again (but they won't refund you!). They still get 2 months of money from a one-month sub. It's genius, and it's no wonder "legit" companies have adopted porno site practices.
If you really did deliver a hand written request to a teller, then after that ordeal I would have closed/moved my account stating that if they can lose letters, I wouldn't trust them to deal with my cheques either.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Not surpising that Consumer Reports got it perfect. Their host organization, the Consumers Union, published a set of guidelines they think all online sites should follow in order to promote online credibility. It's http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/consumer-reports-w ebwatch-guidelines.cfm.
h y3.pdf.
They've also compiled a list of every site that's pledged to follow the guidelines. (PDF) http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/images/praisewort
I signed up for MySpace (yeah. I know.) from an email address with a plus in it.
Wanted to cancel, and the confirmation email never came.
Tried changing my email address (to something without a plus) and the confirmation email never came.
Wrote to privacy@myspace.com like MySpace says to in this situation... it's been 2-3 months and the account is still there.
For a couple of those months the account's name has been the uncensored version of "F*** MySpace" and its profile has been a description of how broken MySpace is in this regard. This hasn't gotten it canceled either.
Once I manage to move the account's few friends somewhere else, I think I'll have to update its publicly-visible goodness with some choice commentary on "Tom," Rupert Murdoch, barnyard animals, drugs, Al-Qaeda, minors, and whatever else, to see if that helps.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I'd have thought they companies would want to know who really doesn't want to receive their junk.
You think this because you are a normal, intelligent person. Marketing people do not think this because they are neither normal nor intelligent.
All marketing people know is that N% of the junk mail they send results in sales. Therefore, in order to increase sales, all you have to do is send more junk mail. Dividing customers into groups like "Might buy from us" and "Won't buy from us" is simply too complicated, even when the customer is practically doing it for you by asking you to stop hassling them.
It's your problem, not the customer's problem if there is a lot of work to cancel an account. Making it hard for a customer to cancel or charging them to cancel because your cancelation processes are no good is just wrong.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
When I tried to cancel my ebay account, which had no pending sales/buys in it at all, it took from early August of 2005 to October 2005 of acting like an ass to get them to cancel my account. I tried everything, including terms-of-service violations in public to get them to pay attention. I even sent email messages consisting of 1MB (or was it two or three?) each of "Cancel My Account!" It's amazing how much you can cut and paste into an ebay feedback dialog (I found out, because when they reply the quote the whole thing). And even when they finally got around to me, they sent me an email saying that it would take a few more weeks. Just how difficult is it to delete an empty account?
Why did I want it cancelled? Fraud. Obvious out-and-out fraud that I wasn't the victim of, but saw happening, and when it was brought to their attention the silence was deafening. Ebay's utter lack of even basic business honesty really offends me. Microsoft looks like a shining paragon of righteousness standing next to them. Even thinking of it now, more than a year later, a pit of anger is forming in my gut.
I can only think of one reason why they make it so difficult to delete accounts: that it inflates the user base fraudulently. Inactive accounts count as "members" and they make it that difficult to cancel hoping that the user just gives up, which is probably what happens most of the time. It really was insane how much effort I had to put into getting an empty account nuked.
Ebay, as a result, is on my list as "Not Recommended"
--
BMO
On a point of pedantry, you won't go 'splat'. Skydivers call dying "bouncing" for a reason.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It would depend upon the distance from which you are being observed as you hit the ground, and perhaps your level of obesity.
I imagine that a sufficiently fat person, if one were to observe from say, 3 feet, would make a quite satisfying "splat" as he hit the ground.
But no question that a surprising amount of bounce would be involved, too. And a great deal of thud.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I actually reported my card lost and had it replaced in order to get rid of an Earthlink DSL account a couple of years ago. Even though I (or anyone else) hadn't lived at the DSL location for 6 mos, and the phone line asociated w/ the acount had been disconnected for the same amount of time, they would not cancel the acount, so I did what I had to do.
The most stupid thing is that I had no problem whatsoever opening another account in another city afterwards. Seems their marketing department has more cloud than their accounts receivable...
First you have to call them and spend hours on the phone explaining that you want their services cancelled, why, what you think of their service, your bank card, address, etc. etc. then they give you all types of discounts and freebies to make you change your mind when they finally do cancel it by the end of the month, they send you a 3-month free trial which if you don't cancel it, gets automatically activated into a full membership again
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That sold websites to small to medium sized businesses, but they did it like a telemarketing company. They were told it would be a trial period and if they didn't like it then they could cancel at any time. The company made lots of money because a lot of the businesses totally forgot about the website and wouldn't know they were being billed until the next quarter when they saw the bill. Some businesses were billed through their business phone company and wouldn't even notice the charge. My friends in customer service said it was stressful because they were required to retain an insane amount of customers and the customers would just go off on them. The company got sued several times, so they ended up audio taping the customers saying yes to the website trial.
Can I bum a sig?
Individually your 4.95 and up account is piffle. In the aggregate however, hundreds, or thousands of such charges represent considerable sums. Even if company X gives you a refund after 30, 60 or 90 days, they have had, in essence, an interest free loan amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. Not a bad plan if you a shady operator, or a marginal service, to boost your bottom line.
-- whatchulookinherefor?
I'd like to add one to that list, though not really a PC online service. Xbox Live.
When I had to leave for college a year or two back, I couldn't bring my Xbox with me (because it wasn't even mine. It belongs to my brother. I brought my Gamecube instead) So when I decided it was better to cancel it rather than pay another $50 for a year of a service I rarely used (I only played a few games, and Splinter Cell taught me to hate 13 year olds like nothing else), for a system I wouldn't have, I went to cancel, but, surprise, Microsoft's web pages have no information on canceling. After a great deal of googling, I found out the only way to cancel is to call a special tech-support hotline. And of course, the operator asked about 15 times if I was sure, and listed so many alternatives ("Maybe someone else up there will have an Xbox."). Thanks to that, I don't think I'll ever play another Xbox (or more realistically, a 360, if I ever get the system) game online ever again.
I find it odd that True.com would make it difficult to cancel the account. Services like True.com and Match.com are designed to be temporary. "Once You Find you Mate you don't need the service anymore". Making it hard to cancel make me feel that they are not going to try to find a match, which is what I am paying them for. I used match.com myself and when I found my now wife. Canceling the service was relatively easy. Especially in the exit interview I just put down I found my match they just canceled it quickly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You guys complain of waiting minutes or hours and having to search/click a lot to finnaly cancel an account. My experience w/ iConnectHere is gotta to take the cake -- it took 2 mths! Bastards would stall constantly, ask for a second chance and never get the cancellation process going. I wanted it cancelled within the first 30 days, yet they charged my acct for two additional mths. Finally had my cc company block their charges, and soon after that they complied. Beware.
I wonder what would happen if a subscriber didn't update their credit card info once their card expires to let the account lapse.
I actually cancelled the card. They kept sending me bills for AOL anyway. When I called the credit card company to complain, they said "We can't cancel that. They're providing you with a service." I said, "No they're not. That's the point."
They finally turned it into a conference call with a guy from AOL on the phone. After insisting with a slightly raised voice that I really wanted both the credit card and the AOL account cancelled, they did it.
I would have kept the card except that their "customer service" people made it clear that they had made some deal with AOL at my expense.
Also, since it is the new year, it's a good time to go ahead and request your annual free credit report from all three major credit reporting services. Even if you don't have any reason to dispute any debts on your report, go ahead and get it each year to stay on top of your credit report. It's free for you once per year, so you may as well. You can save the HTML report so you'll have it handy all year long. It's a good idea to review your report each year to make sure there aren't any mistakes.
If I sign up for a trial membership or something that requires a credit card, I create a temporary credit card (via my CC account with MBNA, now Bank of America) with a spending limit of only what I need, and use that. If the vendor earns my trust, I change my billing info to a real card. If they don't, well, good luck trying to perpetually bill the temporary card, fuckers!
I also run my own mailserver, so every vendor I deal with gets their own address which just redirects to my main address. When I cease dealing with them, their e-mail address goes away and I never see another message from them. (This is also a handy method to see who's selling their customer databases to spammers)
~Philly
I just canceled a real Superpass account I'd been meaning to cancel for ages. It was dead easy. I told them I wanted to upgrade to Rhapsody. It so happens the memberships aren't directly transferable so they have to de-register you from Superpass and then you have to manually sign up for Rhapsody. So they canceled my Superpass but, of course, I never signed up for the Rhapsody. In fairness to them, I understand the Rhapsody service itself is pretty good as far as those subscription music plans go, and also it ties into one of the Sansa products. Their Superpass was also a decent deal (it included 10 purchased downloads a month) until they decided to tack on some useless bonus software as an excuse for jacking up the price. So I think they've got some decent offerings at their core, but if Real ever want to compete with iTunes, they're going to have to quit with the silly/sleazy business practices.
One other thing. People here keep trotting out that VISA Terms and Conditions which says the merchant is not allowed to bind you to XYZ terms (e.g., they can't penalize you for using virtual cc numbers) But if you contractually agree to the penalty, I wonder if the Visa T&C will be a valid defense? After all, just because they've breached their contract with VISA doesn't mean you (necessarily) get to breach your contract with the merchant. Presumably your defense would be fraudulent inducement? Any case law on this?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I recently managed a small family restaurant and two years ago, we finally relented and got a credit card machine service because so many people these days refuse to carry cash on them (sidenote, good luck if a disaster hits and you can't use your credit card for a while due to the electricity/communication systems being out of operation). We were a small 30ish person business with no real leverage to negotiate terms with a credit card company so we're basically told what we could take or have nothing.
Generally speaking, there was a 50 cent charge for every credit card we swiped. Buy a $1.50 drink with a credit card and 33% of the price is that credit card charge. There was a 25 cent charge for invalid cards (account expired, was canceled, someone swiped a card type that we didn't accept, etc). Discover charged the merchants the 50 cent fee plus 3% of the purchase price (again, that $1.50 drink = 50 cent charge + 4.5 cents). American Express was 3% for a personal card and 5% for a business card. We were also charged a $1 service fee every time we ran a statement of how much credit we had been credited (so instead of pulling a credit receipt every time a drawer was counted, it was pulled once a day). There's also the added headache of having to keep signed receipts stored for a period of time just in case they were disputed.
Short story, we took a loss on every credit card transaction under $10 or so. On very large purchases the rewards credit cards took a still pretty good chunk for themselves ($400 party paid for by a corporate AmEx card took $20.50 just for swiping that card). Someone has to pay for the cost the merchants incur for accepting cards and ultimately, it is the patrons who pay. Taking a 5% loss on every transaction and losing money on all transactions until $10 will put most businesses under if they didn't raise prices to compensate... and unfortunately, that means raising prices for cash payers as well (especially on lower end goods that you might by just one of like a 20 ounce Coke).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
AOL did not reactivate your account, in your cardmember agreement it tells you that if upon closing if recurring charges still come in that the credit card company has the right to reactivate your account. And by just reporting your card stolen via the credit card you are still leaving AOL with authorization to maintain an account in your name, which means that when they do not collect money from you they can send it to collections.
Why not just cancel AOL, or of course the super-dooper-easy method get your spouse to do it.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
I wonder what would happen if a subscriber didn't update their credit card info once their card expires to let the account lapse.
In a related note, that very thing happened with me with Gold's Gym - my credit card lapsed and I had moved after college. I got a hold of them about the account after finding negative marks on my credit report. I paid the rest of my contract but they didn't tell me that after my contract was completed, I went to automatic monthly renewal. They also didn't tell me that I couldn't cancel that automatic renewal over the phone, neither could I go in person into one of their local locations. I tried to do both of these, visiting their gym when on vacation because I lived in another state at the time. For the phone cancellation, they said that they worried that some joker might cancel my account for me over the phone. I couldn't cancel at one of their locations because they just didn't cancel an account there...which was odd because a whole gaggle of tanned/manicured individuals were there to *create* accounts for people. I had to fax in a signed statement to their corporate offices (for that set of gyms) saying that I wanted to cancel my account.
So, not only did I have to pay for 6 months of gym "service" while living out of state because they had put me on automatic renewal, more bad credit stuff showed up on my credit report.
When I talked to them on the phone about the whole deal, they politely (sarcasm) responded that automatic renewal was in the contract so it was my own fault. So when I moved back to the state where the account was, I opted to avoid their gym like a basket full of snakes and spiders.
Let's give it up for self-serving companies who go to great lengths to sign people up but have to be threatened with legal action or with a public relations campaign to improve their practices in order to avoid destroying their own customers' credit. Btw, I know a guy whose credit was actually completely ruined by that same chain of Gold's Gyms - which btw is in the Salt Lake and Provo/Orem areas of Utah.
That kind of thing is what happens when you give customer service reps bonus packages for retaining canceling subscribers.
As a sidenote on the 13-year-old thing, it amuses me that Xbox fans will accuse Nintendo of catering only to children when it is their system that is played primarily by young Halo-loving teenagers while Nintendo caters to the mainstream adult crowd through their Touch Generation products and the Wii. I just find it funny.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I had a similar issue with Sprint PCS a few years ago. They thought I owed them cancellation fees when, according to my contract, I didn't. I didn't hear about the matter from them until some collections idiots started getting a hold of my family asking them where I was. After sending some legal paperwork to three different sets of collections agencies, I ended up filing a better business bureau complaint. A very friendly lady from Sprint called me within days and fixed everything, even getting the credit report corrected.
Speaking of Sprint, I do remember getting a bill for them when I canceled. I tried to login to my account on their website to contact customer support and let them know they were wrong, but my account was deactivated because I had canceled my account. When I tried to call them to discuss that problem with them, their automated phone system would not allow me to speak to a customer service rep because, you guessed it, my Sprint PCS Phone Number was invalid. So I wrote a letter explaining it all to them, stuffed it in their pre-paid envelope, and sent it back. 3-6 months later, their outsourced collections lawyers responded.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!