It’s no secret that the phone companies are out to make money. Some earn it in exchange for providing a reliable quality service, while others think up gimmicks to ding you around every corner. Now a lot of us have our own horror stories regarding my service provider in particular, but recently I went through an incident that made me truly appreciate just how carefully they had set me up to spend more money than I signed up for.

I’m a really busy guy, as many readers know. The prospect of having a phone that does more than calls is very attractive to me, which is why I went with a PDA phone. It’s a wonderful piece of technology that helps me manage my schedule, gives me reminders of upcoming appointments, lets me take down people’s contact information, write notes, take pictures and audio recordings, even listen to MP3s. As you probably guessed, that many features don’t come cheap – the going price of this PDA phone is over $500 without a contract. I would have never paid that much for a phone when I can get a laptop for roughly the same price; however, with a three year contract, the device was only $150. Not bad at all – but exactly what they wanted me to think.

Then came the question I always dread hearing: “Do you want to purchase the extended warranty?” The phone came with a 1 year manufacturer’s warranty. Extended warranties can be a lifesaver with electronics – especially portables that you might drop or easily damage. However, after paying $150 for a phone, I was not inclined to pay more than double (add $165) for the extended two year warranty. I decided to take my chances.

OPTION 1: $150 phone + $165 two-year extended warranty = $315.

OPTION 2: Screw the $165 extended warranty = $150.

Everything was going great. My phone was a dream to use, and I wouldn’t leave home without it. The headset that came with it made it easy to listen to music and seamlessly answer calls while I was on the move. I took very good care of it, never once dropping it or letting it get wet. I could connect it up to my computer and synchronize my appointments, tasks, contacts and notes through Microsoft Outlook. This device did it all, with a portability that even a laptop could never beat.

Then one evening while I’m trying to call someone, I hear two rings and then complete silence. I try a second time and hear nothing but silence. Noticing the two failed attempts, the person tries calling me back, and still silence. Totally miffed, I wonder if it might be a problem with the cell phone network – it’s happened before that my calls have received bad connections. I get home later that night and try tinkering with my volume settings to no avail. It is Friday night with a busy weekend schedule ahead of me. I will bring my phone in first thing Monday morning to see if it even needs fixing, I might just be acting silly.

Monday rolls around and I go back to the store in TD Square where I had bought the phone. The clerk doesn’t care about the details of my problem. He looks up my account and tells me, “I’m sorry, your phone is three days out of warranty. It expired on Saturday.”

“But my phone failed on Friday,” I tell him.

“Then you should have brought it in right away that day,” he replies, never mind the fact that the store would have been closed by the time I was certain the phone was broken. “I’ve never seen it cut so close,” he offers unhelpfully.

Then he starts going into my out-of-warranty repair options: $50 courier fee to transport the phone to their Chinook location which handles repairs, plus a $235 repair fee. Then he tells me something that gives me hope, “You can bring your phone in to the repair depot yourself and not pay the overhead charges. They will only charge around $135, plus a service charge for repair time. You would need to take the phone in to get a quote of how much that will be.”

OPTION 3: $50 courier + $285 repair fee = $335.

OPTION 4: $135 repair fee + unknown service charge = approx. $150 to $200?

Well, the choice is obvious for me, but tracking down this “repair depot” is a chore in itself. I grab the white pages and look up the number for repair depot information for my carrier. Ironically when I call, I’m told the number has been disconnected. I then phone the location in Chinook Mall (assuming they were the depot, or would at least know of it) and they quote me the $285 fee with up to a 6 week waiting period, since the phone needs to “get sent away” to the manufacturer. A courtesy phone is an additional $50 charge, so I’m basically paying a repair fee and my regular $40/month to squander a month and a half. After practically having to beat it out of them, they finally recommended I call TAC Mobility. It sounded like another wild goose chase, so we decided to go right to the source with the hopes that they would have a better idea of what I should do.

Option 3a: $50 courier + $285 repair fee + 1.5 wasted months ($40/month) = $395.

Option 3b: $50 courier + $285 repair fee + $50 loaner fee = $385.

I called the customer service line for my carrier. After a 15 minute wait I finally get to talk to someone. That is short lived as they hang up on me instead of transferring me to the department I need. After another infuriating 15 minute wait I finally get through to the tech support department and explain my situation.

“Our company doesn’t give leniency on warranty dates,” he explains, “it’s not my decision; it’s just the way we operate. In fact, even if you had brought your phone in on Friday while it was under warranty, we would not have honoured it because the phone would have gone out of warranty while waiting to be repaired.” This statement just about makes me choke on my own spit, but I remain calm. He tells me that my cheapest route was option 3, to bring it back to the store from whence I bought it and have them send it in for repairs. I explain the story about the repair depot in Chinook, but it doesn’t ring a bell at all. I am now thinking the whole option 4 is a myth, but I’m still not sounding amicable to option 3.

“The only other thing I can do you is to put a discount on your account for $100 off a new phone with a new three year contract.”

“My phone costs $500 regular price,” I tell him, “but on a three year contract it was $150. So I just pay $50 then?”

“No, you would pay $400, and it would replace your current 3 year contract with another one, starting from scratch.”

OPTION 5: $400 for a replacement + 1 additional year of service ($40/month) = $880.

I’m definitely feeling peeved, and consider my option of leaving them for a different provider. But of course I have only gone through one year of my 3 year contract.

OPTION 6: Pay out the remaining 2 years ($40/month) = $960.

Looking back at my current options (3-6), I now truly feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. The easy way out (4) was merely a phantom. My cheapest option (3) is by far the most inconvenient, and the prices of my other options (5, 6) are completely daunting – I refuse to burn close to a grand, even if it does solve the problem immediately!

Then I see the note I took about TAC Mobility, and decide to give them a try anyway. It turns out that they are located several blocks away from Chinook. I explain my situation – they can’t help me with the warranty problem (the manufacturer actually is that sticky), nor can they “fix” my particular model of phone. However they can have a replacement for me in 2 days, for only $145+GST. This is not black market, though it sure sounds too good to be true. This is the option that nobody in a position to milk me for more money seemed to know about.

Merely by talking to them over the phone, they put in the order for my replacement device, and called me two days later as promised. I head down there and the swap takes 10 minutes. They keep my old phone to send back to the manufacturer (hopefully to dissect it and find out what failed), but transfer its battery to the new one. Bingo - I have a working phone again, and I gladly pay the $145+GST. I tell the tech support guy what the phone stores wanted to charge me to get mine repaired, and he scoffs – “We all send the phones back to the carrier in the end. We all get charged this same price, with pre-paid way bills so that we don’t have to pay for courier costs. The difference they charge is all going into their pockets,” he says. “They were definitely trying to rip you off.”

OPTION 7: I get my phone replaced with a refurbished one in 2 days for $145+GST. I have another 3 months warranty on the replacement phone, and I still end up paying a little less than if I had originally bought the 2 year extended warranty (option 2). I still have only two years to go before I can break free from the people who set me up – but they didn’t succeed in keeping me for another year (option 5). As long as my phone doesn’t break down again in exactly a year and three days, I might just escape without paying through the nose for horrendous service and expensive gimmicks.

I wrote this article to warn other cell phone users not to fall for these traps. The phone stores are not representatives of your carrier – they are the middle man, and some of them are downright greedy when taking their cut. Sadly, you can’t always trust customer service reps from your carrier either – to simplify things they are told to point you back to the original store of purchase. Something simple like getting your phone repaired can turn into a major gouge, and trying to avoid it led me through a great deal of frustration and confusion. The fair alternatives are out there if you persevere – don’t take the first answer you get, even if you have to wait on hold for another 15 minutes to speak to somebody different.

Because of this incident, I have already vowed to leave my provider once the contract is up. The more people that circumvent these dishonest and outrageous prices, the more people that wise up to the gimmicks they use to suck you in, then the more honest the phone stores and carriers have to be to keep our business. The future is friendly only if you make it that way, because the now leaves something to be desired.