I hate Telstra

The Telstra corporation is the country's large government-owned telephone and internet provider and has a bit of a monopoly here in Australia. By American standards, it is extremely expensive (big surprise). For example, it costs 50 cents to make a local connection with the gigantic Telstra Tower on Black Mtn about 1K away, then depending on if you are using a pay phone, mobile phone, or landline, will charge per minute (or every 30 seconds) on top of that. So on my prepaid mobile phone, I will pay about 1 dollar per minute for any local call. In comparison, to call the USA on my phone card, once I make the local connection I only pay a little over 1 cent per minute.

Anyways, I recently had to buy a new prepaid mobile phone because Telstra discontinued the phone I had before. Just to set up my message bank, my prepaid account of $10 was completely drained (I only listened to one of four messages, and it was a junk call).

Despite the cost, this was especially annoying for the following reasons:
1)There was no clear disclaimer on the phone manual saying I would be charged just to check messages
2)The people who leave me messages have to pay to make the calls, then I would also have to pay to listen to them
3)I began receiving messages before I had the chance to deactivate the message "service" (thus the people calling me would expect I received their message)
4)When I tried calling customer service from my phone there was a connection fee and my call was refused. This is a great way to prevent people from bothering the customer service representatives with their silly complaints.

I sent Telstra an email and this was their response:

Dear Michelle,

Thank you for your email dated 18/1/08, regarding your message bank.

I would like to apologize for the frustration that this situation is currently causing you. Telstra aims to provide customers with a high level of care regarding the quality of service that we give to the customers and I apologize if you feel that we are not meeting your needs.

We cannot provision your request for a refund, however, we can cancel MessageBank for you.
Kindly provide your mobile number, account number, account inquiry password or date of birth and your drivers license for security purposes.

Please do not hesitate to contact us via www.telstra.com if you require further information or assistance.

Yours sincerely,
Mayett
Telstra Representative


Thank you, Telstra, for your understanding and help in this situation.