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Virgin Mobile ate my insurance

a non e mouse — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:58:31 -0800

I've just been seriously burned by Virgin Mobile - who've reneged on insurance - just wondering what strategies I can use given the situation. I recently transferred to Virgin Mobile from Vodafone (not willingly, Vodafone didn't have coverage to where I was moving). I transferred my number, Treo750 and also my handset insurance (or so I thought).

You see, Virgin's insurer (Risk Insure) only accept insurance for phones that have been purchased through Virgin Mobile, and are no older than a few days old (fair enough).

Trouble is, Virgin Mobile didn't tell me this (I did the transfer over the phone), and accepted the insurance knowing that I'd brought my own phone.

They never sent the PDS (insurance policy), but continued to charge me each month. I assumed I was insured.

I got hit by a wave walking with the kids and of course the phone is now cactus. I called Virgin and they realised they'd made an error and tried to simply cancel my insurance and refund the past 4 months of payments. I argued the point and they then put me through to Risk Insure, who then gave me the run around for 3 weeks before telling me they wouldn't honour the insurance!

They've since offered me 2 months of service for 'free' and sent me these drivelly, over-familiar emails suggesting the matter closed.

For what it's worth the phone was worth $1000AUD.

Do I have any sort of case? God, it's so utterly depressing...

Oh, I'm out of work, low on cash but have plenty of time on my hands

Similar music to Brad Sucks?

thesonofmorgoth — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:20:40 -0800

Anyone know any music similar to Brad Sucks? Listened to one of his songs, dloaded his album from his site but want more :D Thanks in advance!

Do I hate HP, Vista, or Walmart?

ZackTM — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:24:29 -0800

Tell me i didnt waste $1,060 on this laptop This is one of the saddest things thats ever happened to me regarding technology.

Long story short, I bought an HP Pavilion tx1417cl laptop/tablet last month. I managed to buy the display model from Walmart thinking it was a great computer. Little did I know the return period was 15 days!!! The sales lady told me it was 30, and I, of course, never checked the receipt.

The screen is too shiney to use in normal circumstances, the touch screen is super unresponsive, and it came loaded with both a ton of useless HP nonsense that eats up memory, and worst of all Windows Vista.

Since it was the display model, it had a bunch of stuff done to it that i didnt set up. I decided (after I couldnt return it) to format it, and start over from the recovery image. This was an even worse mistake apparently...

The damn thing now runs so slow, my 4 year old XP laptop puts it to shame. I can barely load web pages much less anything data intensive. This is without any new software installed at all!!

What the heck is going on?

HELP me figure out how to do any of the following:
- Get rid of this computer without losing too much money!
- Speed up Windows Vista enough to make me feel like 'hey! i can do things easier on this laptop than I could before I owned it!'
- Revert to Windows XP or maybe even Linux but still be able to use the features that made this damn thing cost so much!

I can only hit F5 on MeFi so many times in one day

Hugh2d2 — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:11:13 -0800

Two weeks left. Replacement is trained. Moving to another department in the same organization so I don't want to burn my built up vacation... What should I do to keep busy while not looking like I'm just trying to look busy?

Help me prove T-Mobile wrong

Mo Nickels — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:22:26 -0800

Can you send an email from your Nokia phone using your T-Mobile service? After ages of frustration, I'm coming to you all to see if I'm nuts.

Some time in the last couple of months I lost a feature on my Nokia 6101, which uses T-Mobile. In short, I used to be able to go to Messages, choose Create Message, choose "Text message," compose the text of the message, and hit Send, after which I would see five items: "Recently used," "To phone number," "To e-mail address," "To many," and "Via sending profile."

Now, however, "To e-mail address" is missing. It simply isn't there. Resetting the phone to factory defaults does not restore it. No amount of fiddling with the settings restores it.

The last T-Mobile person I spoke to as good as called me a liar. She said that the phone has never had that feature, that it couldn't have had that feature, and that there's no way to enable that feature.

But I know it's had that feature because I've used it hundreds of times. I know it, no matter how much the awful, unhelpful people at T-Mobile want to insinuate that I'm making it up. I'm positive it was there—that's how I know it's missing!

In fact, you can find "To email address" in the user manual (page 39). Of course, T-Mobile, like other providers can customize their phones. But if they do delete that feature on shipping phones now, they didn't delete it when I got my phone a couple of years ago.

Now, I don't know why the menu would have disappeared, except that I recently changed my calling plan and added another phone onto the account. There may have been a SIM update push at some point, but I don't know how far back the last one was. The six reps at T-Mobile that I talked to claim that none of these things would make that menu disappear.

So, what I'm looking for here: Do you currently have that "To email address" menu on your Nokia phone (preferably a 6101)? Did you used to have it? Did you lose it? Can you explain?

I realize that the role of "outraged consumer" is a cliché by now. Sorry about that. I'm not the doormat/roll-over-me type. Unfortunately, even if you pay a company hundreds of dollars a month they still have you over the barrel a thousand different ways. The only leverage I have here is community evidence.

Also, I know there are a couple of other ways to send email with the phone, like putting the email address, subject line, and a # sign in the body of the text--but who in the world is going to do that every time? The inconvenience destroys the utility. The old way, the email addresses would show up in "Recently used" and I wouldn't have to retype them time and again. You can also send messages by choosing "Picture message" instead of "Text message," but that includes stupid framing gifs in the body of the message which are annoying to all involved and sometimes mean the messages get marked as spam.

Bell's Thugs

Napierzaza — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:50:48 -0800

I stopped my Bell DSL account several months ago (2-3) because I realized I hated their company and their service. Just today I get a bill from a "Financial Services" office saying I have to pay 200$, but I never got any bill! What can I do? I'm in Montreal Canada,

I'm really not sure what this bill is for as my understanding was that the last month was paid for (they told me that I didn't owe anything). So it's really strange that they're now telling me I owe (a lot). I haven't gotten any Bell bills in the mail since I stopped the service so I'm not sure what it's for. I did pretty much cancel my service with them BECAUSE they were administratively incapable.

What are my options in this situation?
I'd like to know exactly what I'm being charged for, as I suspect that most of it is invalid.
Would this affect my credit rating?

What can I do? I don't want to get a lawyer or anything.

Building a businessSUCKS.com website

spock — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 06:43:04 -0800

Tips on building a thisBusinessSucks.com website? I've found that simply owning such a domain name has given me leverage in negotiating with a business in the past. This time, I may want to go through with building such a site. More inside. Property managment companies are notorious for "legally" ripping people off who rent their properties. Of course you don't find this out until you leave and don't get your deposit back, get charged for extra months rent, etc. I have the feeling that my city is full of people who would love to tell their stories. Publicizing such a site (such as in the campus newspaper) would probably have an impact on their ability to rent to others (or at least they might fear it would) giving me some leverage. Actually building such a site would potentially help more than myself - but be a benefit to anyone looking to avoid predatory property management companies.

I'm interested in doing all that I legally can in creating a site for people to tell their stories about how this business sucks. Any tips or things that should be avoided would be appreciated. (I know that this is not the place to come for LEGAL advise and that you AreNotALawyer). TIA for any suggestions or your experiences.

HTTP transfer working poorly

zek — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:26:19 -0800

I'm having hit-or-miss connection trouble with a Russian topographic map website, which has ~ 4 MB JPEG maps online. It's been driving me nuts all summer. Here's the scoop... (1) Using a direct Internet connection, my downloads will usually "reset" after 30 seconds to 3 minutes. To be exact, the map transfer just quits and goes to "Done", leaving an partial map on the screen.

(2) I have to goad it along, hitting "Reload" to get more and more of the map to load.

(3) Increasing the Firefox network.http.*.timeout values doesn't have any effect.

(4) Here's the kicker -- if I'm connected through any Russian proxy server, the downloads are much faster and don't reset. It doesn't seem to help to use European proxies; they have to be Russian.

(5) The solution seems to continue to use Russian proxy servers, however they're not easy to find. The proxies listed on Atomsoft and Samair is almost entirely garbage that doesn't work, though on occasion the latter will give me a good proxy.

(6) Sample map (large 3500 x 5000 JPEG, beware)

Any network gurus here? Please help me understand what is going on here! Is there some sort of http transfer manager that might work? Or is there a better source of proxy servers than what I'm using?

How much liability coverage?

alan — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 22:50:39 -0800

What's considered a standard "safe" amount of liability coverage to carry on your automobile insurance policy? (Oregon, USA; if that matters)

Before I call and start yelling...

jackofsaxons — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 06:09:42 -0800

Before I call and start yelling... I currently bank at National City, and this past Tuesday and Wednesday my account went negative. Which isn't that big of a deal, I normally have no problem paying over draft charges when they're my fault.

Last night (Thursday) I was waiting for my paycheck (direct deposit) to be deposited in my account at midnight per usual. For some reason, they held it until 3 in the morning, and then they charged me with 4 more overdraft charge fees, even though the funds should have been available at midnight. This is the second or third time they've done this.

Isn't there something wrong with that? I mean... isn't that or shouldn't that be illegal? They're just milking my paycheck!

Held hostage by Wally World

LadyBonita — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 14:04:57 -0800

Did Wal*Mart kidnap me? The power went out and they wouldn't let us leave. Last night at about 10 our small city suffered a power outage while I was shopping at the Super Wal*Mart with my 7yo son. It was nearly pitch black and the back up generator(s) apparently didn't kick in. (neither did the new generator at a local supermarket where my sil was). We were escorted (herded?) with flashlights to the front of the building and told we couldn't leave until power was restored . Babies and kids (including mine) were scared and crying and there was a lot of general confusion. Reason we weren't allowed to leave? They wanted to make sure we weren't stealing anything. Eventually, after 20 minutes or so, when it was obvious the power wasn't going to quickly be restored, they let us leave. After checking us over with flashlights.

What I want to know is if they had any right to do this? Were we being held hostage, kidnapped, falsely imprisioned? And how the hell could I have gotten out of there if they had insisted we stay any longer?

My sil at the supermarket simply left her cart and was escorted out to her car by a stockboy carrying a flashlight. Within 10 minutes of the outage.