Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

I think this chapter is closed in Bell. I called them, talked for 10 or 15 minutes, and I was really polite. I didn’t even swear once! I called Bell Mobility, not the collection company, and I found out that Bell Mobility doesn’t sell the account to the collection agencies anymore. They actually just outsource the collection process. Guess what that means?

That they’re not responsible for anything the collection people do or say!

Does that sound familiar? Anyways, I freaked out and explained about the collection agent wanting fifty bucks and gave him basically a smaller version of my entry from last night (minus the FONT tags). He told me that the account is still with Bell Mobility and as I said, the don’t outright sell it to the agencies anymore. He then verified that they received the money and “called off the dogs” so to speak. And then he asked for the name and extension of the collection agent that contacted me and assured me he was going to e-mail their manager about this. Riiiiiight, we’ll see.

Anyways, he says it’s all cool and that this won’t affect my credit rating. In a about three months I’m going to pull my record from Equifax and make sure.

Alright, I’m going to try to type this as I’m like livid with anger. You all remember when I cancelled my Bell Mobility account and bitched about how fucked their billing department was? Things just got even crazier. First though, look at what I’ve paid Bell Mobility. This is what I get for marrying a woman in Japan :-)

• March 23 2005 - $418.49
• April 18 2005 - $363.29 (a slow month)
• May 29 2005 - $634.72
• July 15 2005 - $505.00

That July was my last Bell Mobility bill, and my first Telus Mobility bill. Chie was also here by then so the cost went significantly down and we’re paying about $80 a month for two mobile phones.

Last week I get a letter from Bell to my parents address (which was my main billing address with them) about owing $51.78 to Bell Mobility. The letter from Bell was received on September 16, 2005 and paid in full the Monday after receiving it (two days ago).

After that - today - my parents get two more letters. The first is from Bell and is dated August 26, 2005. It says that I must pay this bill within five days or it’ll go to a collection agency. The other letter is - can you guess? From the collection agency! A “Nor Don Collection Network” to be specific, demanding the fifty bucks! So Bell actually passed a fifty dollar outstanding fee to a collection agency before fucking notifying me! I’m a goddamned Bell home phoneline customer - and I have a pristine payment record with them. Let me summarise the table above - in four months time I paid $1921.50 to Bell Mobility. Let me repeat that:

$1921.50

Did you get that?

$1921.50 in 4 months

And then, without calling me (at my Bell home phone) or my parents (which was registered as the phone number for my billing address) these morons transfer $50 to a collection agent. Not to mention that nobody can figure out why I suddenly owe them fifty dollars after paying my final bill in total.

So the trail so far is:

• Bell fucking me in October of 2004
• Bell still fucking me in November of 2004
• And finally this post!

So now what? I call Bell tomorrow I guess, and hope that they can actually repeal the charge from the collection agent. The last thing I want to do is call the collection agent themselves - I mean, what percentage of people call them saying that they don’t owe them money? 90%? Shit.

That’s it I guess. I’m gonna uh, I don’t know, take a bunch of Tylenol Flu Nighttime medication and knock myself out until their office is open tomorrow morning. I will solve this though. On one hand I hope they can’t correct it and that I take it to a lawyer. I’m stunned and shocked that they can do this to this many customers and still operate a business. I’m stunned that the CRTC will have nothing to do with the people being screwed by Bell Mobility. And I’m stunned that I’ve only ever seen their billing fuckup referenced in one newspaper, and that was so long ago that I can’t even find the link! Anyways, I’ll post more if anything changes. Jesus jumped-up Christ.

Apparently you don’t even need a modchip! Taken from here:

If you want to play any playstation 1 game for free, you need to hack. read on to find out how to hack without a mod chip:

1] Have your playstation on and by your computer
2] Put a blank disk into your CD-RW
3] Run a program called “ForumChek o4″. it has special stuff running in the background hidden, so dont think nothing is happening.
4] open a NEW notepad file.
5] type “s4p4ncomputercorpshasownedonceagain”. you can copy and paste if you wish to
6] ForumChek o4 should recognize this as a que and start “S4p4N’s PS Hak o4″
7] Select the game that you want
8] click on “burn now”
9] while it is says “initializing”, type “537285″
10] when it is done burning, take it out
11] place it into ANOTHER CD-R or CD-RW drive
12] play the file called “sounds.wav”
13] if you hear a bunch of numbers, it is a success
if you hear static or nothing, either check taht you speakers are on or that it was burned right
14] if successful, just pop it into your PS and play!!

God bless the Internet.

Derek sent me a link to information about the new Nintendo controller - it actually is a lot more interesting than I expected. Maybe that’ll teach me to stop being such a jaded asshole!

Well, we watched this tonight. It was good. Not as good as Appleseed, but the action in Advent Children was so over-the-top awesome that it has to be seen. It’s pretty much a huge shout out to the fans of the series (specifically FF7 of course) so whether or not you enjoyed the game may be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy this.

And it’s good to see the people behind the first Final Fantasy movie still doing incredible animation. Sure, the first was awful (I still liked it) - but quitters never win! Or something.

Chie and I picked up Appleseed the other day from HMV (only twenty bucks) and managed to watch it last night. It was superb - definitely the most technically stunning anime I’ve seen. At first I thought it used a hybrid cell and 3D model technique like Ghost in the Shell: Innocence or Beautiful Days, but it actually uses models for the characters as well. I didn’t even notice that until well into the movie. The story is decent too and really picks up the pace near the end.

Wow, nobody saw this coming.

“A beleaguered Michael Brown said Friday he doesn’t know why he was removed from his onsite command of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts…“

I do, you dumb bastard! Anyways, I can’t help but wonder though if Brown’s going to be the scapegoat for the whole fucking shebang. No no, I take it back - I’d put money on him being the scapegoat. Though it’s incredibly refreshing to see blatant cronyism being covered by all of the major media outlets (even Fox!)

…of the horrible water damage to the floors in my apartment! I’ve been calling the maintenance and management offices every week since it happened too, and the answer is always, “They’ll be fixed next week!” Go Greenwin go!

“These are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe… It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.“

The link goes to a (sadly WMV) video clip of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann going crazy with frustration and anger.