A lot has been happening to the poor and the middle class. Hidden fees, interest a loan shark wouldn't charge and companies just plain taking advatage of us. Our family got hosed this week by our interenet provider, Com Cast. Com Cast recently bought out Adelphia as the local cable/internet company in this area. They did a bad (to put it mildly) job of transfering all their newly aquried accounts (ours included). Everytime we would call they would spend a half hour just trying to find us in the system *sigh* The last time we called they said we had never been offically switched over and once they did so our bill increased $20. We paid the bill and then the next week we received a shut off notice. They had created another account, not replaced the old one, and so even though we had paid our bill they still thought we owed them money. Hence we were shut off.
The best part is when you call you can't talk to a person. It's all automated, so to get our internet turned back on we had to pay the bill we didn't owe and now, after the fact, we have to try and get ahold of a person and sort it out to get our money back (I'm not holding my breath).
*double sigh*
It's not a mistake, it's a scam. I heard last week on Fresh Air with Terri Gross that businesses do this sort of thing on purpose all the time and it's only getting worse as corporations run amuck, completely unchecked in our society, raping and pillaging the working poor.
So I'm back online, although I don't know for how long. We can barely afford one bill, we certainly can't afford two.
