Entrapment. Featuring: CASEMA

Hello fellow bloggers, It’s been ages since I last blogged! In the meantime, I have been on holiday in France (blogstories coming), and since I returned I have been chasing various authorities and service providers for their various mistakes which really are a pain in you know where. Now that my hunt is coming to an end and I’m beginning to see some signs of positive results on the horizon, I first feel the need to ventilate my frustration with all these buttheads before I proceed to the more entertaining blogstuff, and that is complaining about the silly French (no offense the French among you) and other sunny stories.

If you’re fond of modern variants of kafka-like stories, you’ll probably enjoy this. I have three stories to tell, a fine trilogy. One is about the Dutch television operator CASEMA, the second story is about the Dutch telecom KPN, and the last one is about the Dutch immigration office IND. Let me start with CASEMA, the tv provider. This story is the longest, the most terrible and the most maddening of the three. We start with the climax, so to say.

Since recently, CASEMA offers a new service: an internet connection through the tv cable. You can be online all day for a fixed (and fairly low) price per month. So when I first heard about it, I though: great! No extra cables, wires, connections, you name it. Simple and elegant. I ordered the damn thing.

It arrived and it never worked. Of our two computers, it only worked on one, and even then it sometimes had trouble getting started. To make things worse, it also disturbed the television, so we had trouble all over. Fortunately, CASEMA offered this special service of trying out the connection for two months and then cancelling without extra charges. So I thought: great. And wrote them a letter to disconnect the whole bloody thing. So far so good.

A few days later I receive a confirmation of receipt of my letter and the message is as follows: we have to post the modem with cables and all to some obscure address in Waddinxveen (even a native Dutchman probably never heard of this place), at our own cost (!), and within five days, otherwise they charge us some exorbitant sum. So I thought okay, let’s send them the whole thing and get done with it. I posted it. Exit CASEMA.

And imagine: There was even good news! The good news was that my letter came in time for them to disconnect the whole thing after one month (rather than two), so that we only had to pay that one month’s charges, while we already feared and anticipated they would charge us the full two months. Great!

Never believe there's anything like good news. A few days later I receive the invoice. The costs are: two months’ worth of charges for the internet connection AND the monthly fee is twice as much as our contract initially said! What went wrong?

Very angry, I call CASEMA. Of course it's a 0900 number with extra charges per minute and I get put on hold... for twenty minutes. Finally I get this fellow on the phone, he speaks Dutch with an accent (well, so do I, but then I don't have to help angry clients and cause them extra irritation). He admits that it's a mistake that we were charged an extra month, and we'll get our money back. But the monthly fee is correct, after all, we ordered the "multi" package. The “multi” package? Hold on.

WE DIDN'T! I remember I spoke to the woman on the phone when I first ordered this CASEMA package, and articulated "midi" very clearly. The “midi” package is designed for people who only use internet to email and do a little browsing and so, like us, while the “multi” package is for people who download movies and music and porn and I don't know what more, none of which we ever did, do or intend to start doing. Not one melody. I remember I had a whole conversation with this woman about internet habits and she knew where I stood.

AHA, says the fellow with the accent. I think I know what the problem is. I say: what is the problem then??? And he goes on to explain (it took me some time to fathom, so take your time to read): In June, when I ordered the midi package, CASEMA had two so-called promotion offers. One offer was the ‘first try out, then pay’ option, which allows you to use the internet connection for two months before (automatically) switching to a year-long subscription. That is what they meant by promising us we could cancel the whole subscription within two months at no extra cost, nevermind the expensive shipping of the modem to Waddinxveen of all places. But more importantly, the second offer was the ‘internet at a low price’ option, which gave you the opportunity to make use of the ‘multi’ package for the price of the ‘midi’ package.

But here comes the tricky bit: The two promotion offers ran parallel, but they could not be combined. So what probably happened was this: After I ordered my ‘midi’ package, the woman gave me an automatic upgrade to a ‘multi’ package (usually twice as expensive but now at the same cost), but she forgot to tell me that the ‘first try out, then pay’ option only referred to the ‘midi’ package, so once I got the upgrade, I was stuck with the multi for at least a year. Which however I didn’t know, so I cancelled the whole subscription after one month, and they automatically charged me the regular price of the ‘multi’ package. Aha, the coin is dropping.

Now that I’m finally getting the point, the fellow with the accent is probably wiping cold sweat from his forehead. He still didn’t tell me the really bad news, and it’s about to come now: they keep no record of orders made by telephone, so nobody will ever find out what it actually was that I ordered, and there is no way for me to convince them and get my money back, even though the poor fellow agrees that it was probably a mistake on their part.

Intermezzo: it is an important lesson to learn that even in an era of high-speed information transfers, it turns out to be much wiser to actually type a regular letter, post it with regular mail, get a receipt, keep it, file it in your grandmother’s chest, and be sure that this is probably the only way to keep tangible proof of whatever it is you bought. Or am I the only one who gets tricked into this kind of a situation?

What next? I plan to go on corresponding with them about any progress on the matter and file at least three complaints (three is supposed to be a lucky number, we’ll see). If I achieve anything I’ll let you know. Next time I’ll blog about the KPN blunder and the IND blunder. Not as exciting as CASEMA, but still entertaining enough for a short blog pause :-)!