Color Me Surprised

So a few weeks ago, we switched from T-mobile to Cingular. There were several reasons for doing so, not the least of which being that Crozer (my employer) has a corporate contract with them which provides me with an employee discount. This discount affords 24% off our monthly bill as well as 45% off new equipment purchases.

The phones we got were priced at $199 with a 2 year contract, and that price came down to $149 after a $50 mail-in rebate. So with my 45% off, I figure that brings it down into the range of "reasonable".

Our bill in the store that day was still rather high, being sans-rebate firstly, but also sans-corporate discount. The salesperson at the store said that our discount savings would show up on our monthly bill.

Imagine my surprise when the bill came yesterday and was missing both the monthly discount as well as the refund from the phone purchase that I was expecting. So I called Cingular customer service post-haste.

Right off the bat, the guy was able to tell me that the monthly discount could take until the next month to show up on the bill. I can buy that, fine. But he was unsure about the hardware discount, so he put me on hold for a while so he could find somebody who did know what the deal was. Some ten minutes later, he was back on the line connecting me to someone in the billing department. That gentleman tells me that the price of $199 was actually a discounted price, that the "street price" of the phone is actually $350. If we were to use the discount, it would be off of that price. He then goes off on a short tangent about how salespeople in the stores sometimes do a poor job of explaining the discount or talk to fast or whatnot.

So I'm basically expecting, at this point, that I'm about to get a corporate sounding nicety like, "Sorry about the misunderstanding," and being left out of luck. But no, to my shock he tells me that since the salesperson didn't explain the discount properly, he was going to go ahead and give me the 45% off of the $199 price of each of the phones anyway. That means $178 refunded to my account, plus the $100 in rebates that will be processed in 10-12 short weeks. For serious.

That was basically what I thought the deal was in the first place, but hey, if it took another 20 minutes on the phone to solidify the details, then hey, it's cool.