This is a cautionary tale, for any of you who are using, or want to use the Canberra Times Direct service.
Both I, and my housemate, have used this service off and on; mostly for the Saturday papers. We’ve had reasons to cancel it for a while, and reasons to pick it up again. For the most part, this has been painless.
We’ve had a few strange incidents over the times. We recieved a paper every day, not just the Saturdays, for a few weeks. We rang them to enquire, and they didn’t seem to know anything about it. It continued two weeks after that call, then stopped. Other times, when we cancelled, we’d get a month or so where the paper still arrived, but we weren’t charged.
So when my housemate last rang to cancel her Saturday delivery, we didn’t see anything strange in the paper still arriving. Until she got a Bill, that is.
She rang to explain, and was told that there was no record of the earlier call and so she would have to pay the Bill. However they would now cancel the subscription.
For the last couple of months she’s been ringing them occasionally to try to clear this up, but with no evidence, this had no effect. Today she simply paid the Bill, as she was sick of it.
The moral of this story? As with all transactions with a business over the phone: always keep notes of date and time you rang (or they rang you), who you talked to, and enough details of the conversation to be useful.