Err. . . .   What might the bill have told him?  According to the story
above, he was being billed at his normal and expected rate!

If I get a normal bill, I write a check for the amount of the bill.  If
the amount is not the normal and expected amount I will want to know why
before paying it!

Who told you he didn't look at his bill for 9 months? Or did you just
make that up? He claims that during that 9 months he was billed
correctly (which he presumably knew from looking at the bill) and as
expected and then, after 9 months, they raised him to the 75 cent rate.

Where do you make the jump from 'paying his bill for nine months' to "...not
looking at the bill for nine months"??

Dean

Mea culpa. I stand corrected---my bad.

I just re-read the linked article, and came across this passage:

" ....the best that Sprint could offer me was for me to pay my exuberant
(sic) bill and would give me a whopping 10% off the rest of the bills for
the remainder of my contract".

I'm assuming he meant "exorbitant" bill.

IMHO, that's a pretty fair offer. Now, upon reflection, the subject of the
OP appears to be a little greedy. What, exactly, did he expect Sprint to
do??

Dean

That seems unlikely to me.  He noticed that his bills were high during
the nine months.  The natural thing you do when you think you are on a
"normal" plan and get a high bill is look to see how many minutes you
used over your plan minutes.

My recollection of Sprint bills during that timeframe is that they
pretty clearly broke down the minutes into in-plan minutes and minute
over plan.  Thus, when he says that the high bill was due to going over
his minutes, I think that means he saw his normal in-plan minutes
listed, and extra minutes listed.  (And that is the kind of usage
pattern you'd expect on someone who has just returned from active
deployment and is now back in unrestricted communication with friends
and family, but is still far away from home).

Also, consider that he says the bills ran $60-$150/month during the nine
months.  If he was on a plan that was $30/month for 0 minutes, plus
$0.75/minute used, that would imply he was using the phone for 40-160
minutes per month.

If he were using the phone that little (well under the included minutes
in even the sparsest regular plan, isn't it?), and thought he was still
on a regular plan, getting a large bill would have been an immediate tip
off that something was wrong.  You only dismiss a larger than normal
bill when you think that you were using a larger than normal number of
minutes.  Even if he misread the bill and thought that the minutes he
was being charged $0.75 were overage minutes, surely he would have
noticed that (1) it is odd to have overage minutes at all when he is not
using the phone much, and (2) *all* of his minutes are overage minutes.

Thus, I think the only hypothesis consistent with the story we've been
given is that he was using the phone quite a lot in those nine months
after returning, and was being billed on a "normal" plan (that is, one
with a bunch of included minutes, plus per minute charged on overage
minutes), and that after nine months, Sprint screwed up and switched him
to $0.75/minute.

Here's what I suspect happened.  He says Sprint earlier had suggested he
change plans, because he was paying a lot for long distance.  I suspect
the plan he changed to was the Sprint Basic plan (or whatever the
equivalent was then).  That's currently $30/month for 200 minutes, and
$0.45/minute for overage minutes.

When he left, they did not deactivate it.  That explains why he
continued to get charged $30/month on his "deactivated" plan.

When he got back, the phone was working, because the plan never had
stopped.

He then starts using the phone for 250-500 minutes per month
(approximately--I'm rounding here), generating bills in the $60-$150
range.  All is well for nine months, and then, for some reason, Sprint
finally gets around to actually processing his deactivation request,
which they handle by switching him to a $0.75/minute pay as you go plan
(which is a sensible way for them to handle this--it keeps his account
active for when he comes back they just have to change plans back, and
makes him pay $0 while he is deployed and unable to use the phone...the
only problem is that they are nearly two years late in doing this!).

That same month, perhaps due to heavy use around the holidays, he has an
even higher usage, around 650 minutes, and blammo--he gets a $500 bill
instead of the $230 that he would have expected based on the previous
nine months.