End-of-year annoyances

 There's apparently no end to the number of thorns out there awaiting to poke you in the side as you make your way through the year.  Here for example are two:

Annoyance #1:   We went to the Verizon store to upgrade our iPhones and create a new plan because my wife and her business partner had to dissolve their old account.

Fine. No problem,  but in the course of the conversation it came to the customer service rep's attention that I had a separate plan for my iPad.  He suggested I bring it in the next day and merge my plan with my wife's new plan thereby saving about $10 a month.

So I returned the next day with my iPad and all the paper work.  The guy we originally spoke to was busy so someone else helped me.  I explained the whole thing to him.  He played on his computer for a while, then he reconfigured all the settings on my iPad.  He told me to be sure to call my credit card company and tell them not to charge me anymore for my original fee. 

Fine. I called, explained everything and the guy said they already knew about it.  Great.

The very next day I found a charge on my credit card statement for the old plan!  Sooooo I called again, got a different person of course who barely spoke English and explained everything.  They're starting an investigation.  I got a case number and, well, we'll see. Stay tuned.

Annoyance #2:  I got a bill a little while ago from my local newspaper for an outrageous yearly subscription amount for 7 day a week delivery and the e-edition.

I called them to cancel the print paper and just go with the e-edition because their paper wasn't worth half what they wanted to charge.  The lady passed me on to their 'retention' representative and we negotiated a 50% cut in the yearly amount if I agreed to pay by credit card so I did.

Sure enough my statement reflected the old price.  I called again, explained everything yet again and got a credit.

I suppose in the overall scheme of things these annoyances don't amount to all that much but why should I have to resort to spending all this time making all these calls and explaining things over and over again to straighten out screw-ups?  The answer is I shouldn't. 

Happy new year.