It's worth checking out his full twitter page, https://twitter.com/donttrythis

In addition to being pissed at AT&T, this is what he says about the RIAA/MPAA:

"I believe the RIAA to be a bunch of venal idiots. I don't think much of the MPAA either for that matter."

He seems to be a genuinely cool guy, with a well calibrated BS detector.

"Today the tweeps became twoops. Just got off the phone with AT&T and they've taken care of everything to my great satisfaction.#twitterrules"

Seems like it's all settled, for him at least. Wonder about everyone else, though.

What's impressive is that this whole episode took only 5 hours from start to finish. Sometimes, it seems like it takes that long just to get talking to a real person.

It has to help that he's semi-famous. I remember the exact same thing happening to a Verizon customer a few years back, and it certainly took longer than 5 hours for him to get his money back.

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-... (the audio link has gone dead)

These companies need to learn math.

There was a big stink a few years about about the same 0.015 "cents" with Verizon. The guy recorded his phone call, and wrote a series of blog posts about it. http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-...

We have had this problem within Europe for a long time, but the European Union have acctually started taking care of the problem. Now there is a maximum fee on sms and voice calls when roaming within the union. About $0.50 to call another country and $0.20 to recive a call. From march 2010 the operator must provide a limiting function on data roaming, which cuts you off when you reach a certain amount.

I just realized something odd about this oft-repeated billing scenario: the very few people who could realistically pay $11k overage bills also always have the means to fight it.

Does anyone ever pay these bills?

Everyone has the means to fight this.

Let's see, I was in 7th grade or so (6 years ago?) and Comcast came to install their service as we followed their wish to ditch the dish. The man that came did some damage to the house before he finished. Dad refused to pay, he refused to finish the job. We had no TV, a large hole in a ceiling, and more...

Dad was pissed but apparently I was even more angry after I was told someone would come by only in a week or so. So what did I do?

I went on Google and found the email of the head of the south east region of Comcast. I sent him a long email expressing my unhappiness and I told him I was going to post my story on my blog. I didn't think it would lead to anything, I did this without my family's knowledge.

Next morning I awoke as my dad shook me asking me what I did. We had 3-5 Comcast vans parked outside our house in addition to an insurance repair firm fixing the hole. I had a blog for the purpose of learning what a blog was, messing around with HTML/CSS, no viewers. I didn't say that of course. The threat was enough.

With twitter/facebook, it's even easier. Managers know that company reputation is in the grips of one unhappy customer.

I wonder what happens if you have an auto-deduction from your account. Not a problem for the monthly bills, but it would suck to find $11k taken out of one's bank account with the deduction done through a process that, although extremely unethical, is technically legal.

If I ever had the intention of using a phone for data, I'd turn off auto-pay immediately.

God this is a perfect post for techcrunch. complaining and Twitter.

In other news, now we know what 50K followers on Twitter are worth (or more accurately, we have a lower bound for it's worth).