When I buy a cellphone, I am quoted a price for the accompanying plan. The price is essentially a lie, or at best an attempt at obscuring the real costs of the plan. If you get a $20.00 per month plan, you pay that, plus an additional system access fee, plus a 911 access fee, plus taxes. On a $20 per month plan, these costs nearly double the cost of the plan.

Isn’t this deception? Isn’t it misleading and underhanded? Why should I pay a fee to access a system that I’ve already paid to access in the form of a cell phone plan? The name doesn’t even make sense! I’ve already paid to access your shitty network! That’s what the plan is for! And to add insult to injury the cellphone companies may simply raise their system access fee at any time. If their profits aren’t quite where they feel they should be, boom, up goes the system access fee.

Frankly, I’d like to launch a class action lawsuit under consumer protection laws, if only to make sure that the full costs of each phone plan are actually named in the plan’s cost, including 911 access fees and whatever other fee cell phone companies want to foist on consumers.

My sister Kristin has an LG Chocolate that has recently decided to throw up a white screen instead of a regular boot-up screen. This is a common problem according to the internet; the LG Chocolate is an expensive phone, but apparently also a low-quality phone. After about six months of use the LG Chocolate, it tends to simply stop working properly, most likely due to a malfunction in the flex cable that connects the two sliding parts. I can’t count the number of comments I found on the internet bewailing this exact problem. There were literally thousands of them, all complaining about the quality of the LG Chocolate.

Basically, the LG Chocolate is a crap phone. As far as I can tell, you should avoid buying one at any cost.

She brought the phone to the Telus store. It was still under warranty. She expected, reasonably, that Telus would fix or replace the phone, due to what appeared to be a manufacturing defect. Instead, she was told, due to a moisture-sensitive sticker that had turned red behind her battery, that her warranty was void, and that they would reject the phone for warranty work. On top of that, they told her that if she sent it in, she’d be charged $25 even if they did nothing to the phone. The icing on the cake was when they offered her $100 off a new phone, as if that makes junking a $300 phone after six months okay.

That’s disgraceful service. Utterly abysmal to the point of being a slap in the face to Kristin, a customer who simply wants a mobile phone that works.

Verizon is replacing LG Chocolates because of this defect. It’s a well documented defect. Yet here’s Telus essentially denying there’s a problem, inventing a flimsy excuse to void her warranty, and saying, “We don’t care about you.” That’s awful.