Posted on 04/09/2009 7:51:57 PM PDT by Gordon Greene
All things phone company are suspect.
Call your cellphone company, and ask them if they will block texting, or if you need to switch carriers. When they say they'll block, keep a written record of the date and time of the call. Refuse to pay for any more texts that they bill you for.
Even if the phone runs out of minutes, it can still be used to dial 911 in a emergency.
That explains why she went from A’s to F’s.
There was texting in the family plan. It just cost extra.
Yes, perhaps the Verizon salesperson should have spelled it out. But I’d bank on a thorough explanation (perhaps in small print even) being in the materials they got with the phone.
Most of those bills are automated. I’d agree that it would be helpful if phone companies could flag an account when something like this is happening. But if they’ve spelled that out in their materials, I see no reason they should be required to spell it out again to the purchaser.
Good answer...
Everybody feels their kids’ peer pressure for them. Bad policy.
The girl's parents, Gregg and Jaylene Christoffersen, thought texting had been disabled
I thought the article said there was no text in the plan.
Why would an upstanding couple want to alert someone when they are making a lot of bucks off of it. :)
I don’t get this texting thing. Hell, it’s a phone! Talk on it. Tell tell you the truth, teens should get a cell phone with no add ons. No text, no camera, no internet.
When my son got his phone, he stood with my husband in the store and insisted that he didn't have anyone to text. My husband explained it's only $10 per month, no big deal. Nope, don't need it, he said. My husband said ok, fine, IF you end up using it, just let me know and I can add the unlimited. I think there was some small number of allowed texts with whatever plan he had.
A month or so later, the kid comes sidling up to me. "I've been texting on my phone and I probably went over the limit. What do I do?" Go confess to your father before he gets that bill!
Luckily, he hadn't gone over the limit by much, so it ended up not being a big deal.
Given the number of text messages sent during school and the girl's grades, it's a safe bet that she was texting during class and that is something the teachers should have stopped. No different than writing notes or chatting.
Since he has already done the ultimate right thing....I probably would have just taken the phone, and let her have it back at MY convenience, for safety reasons when she was going somewhere. I think. We have always had the unlimited package for texting, which probably saved us from this ever happening. Our son was 15 years old when we bought him a phone, and it was more of a security thing. There was not a lot of time spent on it until he got a girl- friend....
The usage and charges can be monitored online. The parents just weren’t thinking. We have changed plans upon the advice of a service rep and very quickly changed back.
Parental controls are $4.99 a month with Verizon. A parent can set hours the phones can be used, block what they don’t want their child to have, block numbers, etc. Well worth it if a young teen is going to have a phone.
When they are paying for these things themselves, they can have free rein. It is amazing how thrifty a kid becomes when financing things from their own pocket.
I guess I’m looking for specifics.
Will they put charges on your phone for services you didn’t request? We read the summary of our calls each month to make sure we recognize all the numbers called.
They tried selling us a bargain plan that then had added surcharges and taxes. When we found out how much more it was, we canceled.
They tried calling and offering us a new, cheaper plan, that also had added surcharges and taxes. We then asked what those surcharges and taxes would be and what they’d put the bill up to, and they told us that they couldn’t tell us ahead of time what they would be cause they didn’t know.
We pointed out that they sure were able to figure out what they were once we bought the plan and since they wouldn’t tell us, forget it. We essentially told them to go pound sand.
The article said there was no texting in their plan. Not that texting was disabled on the phone.
My guess is when they got the family plan they assumed since there was no provision for texting that there was no capability to text.
We could go around and around all night over whether that was Verizon’s fault or the parent’s fault. It’s probably a little of both.
My guess is Verizon for not making it clear. It seems tha parents thought there was none.
“For those of you who didn’t bother to read the whole article....”
“The girl’s parents, Gregg and Jaylene Christoffersen, thought texting had been disabled”
Also in the same article.
“The bill was legit.”
So I guess they didn’t “think” it hard enough.
All I'll say is that I've never had any trouble with Verizon. And when I've called with similar (if not as drastic) issues, they've always been willing to offer suggestions on the best plan for my family.
Your leftover minutes may vary...
Some very good information I didn’t know.
It’s not an issue with us because we don’t allow our kids a phone, but a lot of folks would benefit from the $4.99 a month phone nanny.
Thanks
Heck! It's in the work place too, and in all age groups! I can't count the number of times I'll be talking to someone and they pull out the blasted phone and start texting. It's a new level of rudeness that really burns me up!!
Then there's that danged i-phone that grown people are always playing with...
We’ve found Verizon to be reasonable except with this package deal with our landline.
It was they who did the package plan (taxes and surcharges extra) so the $59.95 /month rapidly went to about $80 per month (Thank you NYS)
When they tried to sell us the *new* cheaper plan if was something like $49 or $39 per month, but they wouldn’t tell us the final cost with the extra charges and taxes on it so we wouldn’t take it.
We didn’t appreciate the duplicity.
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