Paid extra for "additional listing" for ? years

[RedmondStash]

I am outing myself here. In negotiating with our cable company (which also does our land line and Internet), I dug down into the bill and discovered that we were still paying $3.50/month for an "additional listing." For the phone book white pages. Which haven't existed for like a decade now.

So yeah. Self-facepunch. Also a cautionary tale that if you have bills whose details you haven't examined for a while, you might want to.

[RWD]

Wow, I didn't even know that was something that could be paid for. I've never had my own land line.

[RedmondStash]

I come from the days before cell phones. :) Also cell reception where we live isn't great.

[TheAnonOne]

Sometimes you can get back a decent chunk of these things.

Our cable bill (Comcast, only have internet..) was off-promotion for about 6 months. I called and they gave me a promotional price, and also backdated the price for those 6 months. The result was that we didn't have a bill for 4 months, and when we did, it was a lot cheaper.

[Dollar Slice]

When my grandmother died (in the 90s) my dad discovered on her phone bill that they were charging several dollars a month for my grandmother to rent a phone from them. She must have been doing it for decades with this old phone she had. Probably paid four figures for a phone that would cost $20 today. Of course the phone company would never do the right thing and stop charging someone after they've paid 200x the value of the item they were leasing!

When my dad called up to cancel her service they actually had the nerve to demand that he return this stupid phone to them, at his expense. (WTF are they going to do with it?!) If you could kill a person over the phone I don't think that customer service rep would have survived.

[paddedhat]

When my grandmother died (in the 90s) my dad discovered on her phone bill that they were charging several dollars a month for my grandmother to rent a phone from them. She must have been doing it for decades with this old phone she had.

At one time, this was extremely common. The phone companies would also add a few bucks for "interior line maintenance and repair service", if you were dumb enough to agree. More recently the MIL passed. She had been paying $8 a month to RENT a little piece of crap amplifier for the ringer on her land line. At the moment they can be bought for less than $9 on Ebay. Not only did the scumbag outfit collect 100X the value of the device, they informed the estate that the contract could not be cancelled until the device was returned.