My New Toy...And a last F**K YOU! to Bell Canada.

Ahh...so I've been busy learning the ropes, features and abilities of my new phone, the Nokia 6265i:

'Tis a very cool, Matrix-y looking slider, and it has many distinct features...but if you must know, I'd rather have THIS one:

It is not, however, currently available in my neck of the woods.

But how, you ask, did I come by a new Nokia slider?

Well, the battery in my old phone was dying...so I went into the Bell World store on Ste Catherine's street downtown. I knew that I qualified for an upgrade, and there were a number of free phones I had my eye on...except that when I talked to the sales rep he told me that Bell no longer gave existing subscribers the free phones for free. The one I wanted I'd have had to pay a hundred bucks for.

I told them straight up to cancel my contract and I went across the street to Telus. For $29 and taxes I activated my new phone in store.

Of course, customer service and decent products have never been a hallmark of Bell Telephone. They fired their operators and replaced them with several miserable interactive menus...customer service was restructured to not focus on customer service...but on selling products.

Then the sales and service staff became call center drones, forced to sell on every call under pain of losing their jobs...and turnaround on new employees dropped from six months to three.

Then the layoffs began.

Bell's workforce continues to be culled, while their customer service is at all levels worsening. The products they provide, their rate plans, their product packages...all of it is sorely lacking. Speak to an actual live human being and most of the time they're surly, unhelpful or incapable of meeting your needs.

And now, more and more, they're not even Canadian.

Bell is outsourcing an ever-increasing number of customer service and call center jobs to slave-labour wage countries like India, putting hardworking Canadians out of a job, in order to save a few bucks. Are these savings ever passed on to consumers? No.

In fact, Bell continues to look for new and exciting ways to fleece its customers. Take for example the Network Service Fee, introduced in 2005: the cash-grab of $4.25 per month is a completely fictional and unjustified charge that was fraudulently put into being by Bell, with the other phone companies eagerly following suit. Shit, if you can bilk each and every one of your customers four and a quarter more every month, why the fuck not?

And in spite of all the profit-obsessed money grubbing going on at the expense of employee and customer alike, the elite douche bags who run Bell from their towers in Montreal and Toronto scratch their expensively coiffed heads and wonder how it's possible they keep losing customers.

Well, I've cut the cord, swine, from your company.

I'll pay what I owe...gradually and at my leisure.

But after that, you bastards will have seen the last of my money.