AT&T refunded my money

A couple of years ago I switch from AT&T to MCI for my long distance service. MCI had a lower minimum monthly charge. After the switch was complete, I continued to get bills from AT&T, even though I wasn’t a customer anymore.

I called up AT&T customer service, and after getting a bit of a run-around and after they tried several times to get me to switch back, I told them to stop billing me (since I wasn’t getting any long-distance service from them — a reasonable request) and to send me a check for the credit balance.

No check came. I continued to get a monthly e-mail reminder from AT&T that I had a credit balance with them, though. In the meantime, I looked for lucrative offers to sign up with AT&T, burn off my credit balance with them, and leave again. I guess that too many people made too much money off of the phone companies in the 90s by playing them against one another, and they quit doing that.

This morning, I just about hit the floor. A check from AT&T for my credit balance! I looked out the window, and sure enough, there were pigs flying around my back yard! I’m guessing they were required by law to repay the balance after a certain period of time, or it was a result of the proposed merger with SBC.

In any case, I thought that I’d never see that money again. It didn’t cost AT&T much of anything to hold onto it. If these are the tricks that they were using to boost earnings, I can see why they’re a buyout target.

A friend of mine was double-billed at a doctor’s office a few years back. After hearing that the office was not required to notify him of the overpayment, he took steps to get a law passed in Virginia that forced businesses to promptly refund credit balances of $5 or more. (I keep telling my friend to blog his opinions, but he insists that no one would be interested.)