January 2012…still not solved

A few updates. First – nothing has happened with Orange towards resolution. We got a letter threatening to sue us for over 80,000 NIS. We called the lawyers office, only to find it was more answering service than a legal agency and the secretary wanted to handle our call.

Your lawyer took the time to write or at least sign a letter, I told the woman – have her call me.

“I can handle this,” she told me.

“No, you can’t,” I responded.

Two days later, the lawyer called and almost as soon as she said her name, I blasted her with as much of the story as I could get out. Go ahead and sue me, I told her – God help you.

She said she wanted to meet with us…and then two days or so before the meeting, they called to cancel, promising to reschedule. I’m pretty sure I posted this part already – of course, Orange being Orange, they never rescheduled.

That was months ago. I was so disgusted – yet again, but the unprofessional and simply cruel way they conduct business, I wrote a letter to the Ministry of Communication. It took several more weeks, but suddenly, Orange started calling us asking for a meeting.

Of course, they never set a date; and of course they never called back. Orange remains.

Today, I got a Twitter post – after posting a wonderful article detailing a legal firm initiating a lawsuit for 400 million shekels against Orange. The post from Orange:

If you can’t read it, it says @ASoldiersMother (that’s me on Twitter) Hello, we’re sorry about your experience. Pls send you number via DM (direct message) and we will contact you soon.

Of course, I’ve send them the number before – they never contacted us.

Of course, I checked their twitter feed; it is filled with the same post – again and again, to others.

I hope that lawyer wins; I hope Orange loses – more, I wish they would just release us from the agony of their sending bills to us, but ignoring us endlessly.

Orange Refuses to Cooperate with Israeli Army

Why am I not surprised?

Israel is a nation at war – it always has been and some say, sadly, it always will be. The Israeli army is one of the best in the world – not because we love war (we don’t), but because we have no choice.

Yesterday there was a national drill. Our country simulated a major attack across the entire land…one that we all fear will come one day. The air raid sirens sounded in the morning and again at night.

The army is constantly looking for ways to improve and one of those improvements includes alerting civilians immediately of an incoming attack. How brilliant, the army thought, it would be to use everyone’s cellular phones. So they approached the cell phone companies and asked them to cooperate. Two of the major ones agreed – Cellcom and Pelephone understand. The army requested to send the following message to all cellular phone users: “Drill — have a nice day, from the Homefront Command.”

Orange/Partner refused to cooperate – how pathetic!

Yesterday there was a national drill. Our country simulated a major attack across the entire land…one that we all fear will come one day. The air raid sirens sounded in the morning and again at night.

In a real emergency, many in our country would be alerted – all cellular phone users…except those unfortunate enough to have chosen Orange as their cellular phone carrier.

The full story of Orange’s pathetic refusal to cooperate can be found here:

http://en.trend.az/regions/met/israel/1894578.html

Sad and Expected Update

It’s been a while since I updated this blog. The fact is, we moved 8 lines to Pelephone and have been immensely satisfied with their service. What a refreshing break from the horrors of dealing with Orange and Partner!

Pelephone made an accounting error – they took about 4,000 NIS from our account without permission. It literally made my husband sick. Not again. Oh God, I thought, not again! We called them up – we sent emails – no one got back to us. This can’t be happening again, we thought. Do I need to add a page for Pelephone here?

And then – they answered. They came to a meeting – and even before they did, they admitted they made a mistake and credited us for the amount. No, this is not Orange and no, this is not happening again.

See, there is life – and justice – after dealing with Orange. We still technically have 8 lines with Orange, but since they cut them off, we have yet to understand why we should have to pay for them – and, in fact, Orange can take those numbers and do whatever they want. All the people have replaced their service with another and gone to the tremendous inconvenience of telling everyone their new numbers.

Orange – you are such a failure!

As to the update – we got a letter from a lawyer from Orange. When we called, we were told we could not speak to the lawyer, but could talk to Stella. She handles the letters.

“Are you a lawyer?” we asked her.

“No,” she answered.

“Fine, we want to speak to the lawyer who sent us the letter.”

A week later, the lawyer finally called and I told her to read this blog, to read the emails, to be prepared to explain why on the same day we got a letter from the lawyer saying we owed 85,000 NIS, we got a bill from Orange saying we owed 48,000 NIS.

Be prepared, I said to her, to explain how Orange took 16 lines and turned them into 75 – and billed for all of them long after they were told about the dishonest of their representatives.

Be prepared, I told her with anger, to deal with the fury for the agony your client has caused, the damage.

Be prepared to explain the forgeries – the illegal use of electronic signatures and the straight outright forgery of my name on one document.

Be prepared.

She called back to schedule a meeting next week with a representative of Partner.

They will come to our offices – hopefully prepared – I know we will be. Prepared with all the facts, evidence, and anger.

Emails from Others

I am amazed at how many emails, Facebook comments and Twitter tweets I get detailing ways in which people have been cheated by Orange. Here’s the latest from a woman named Shira:

I have been lied to by several agents at Orange. I think that’s how they make their money. Most recently was at the end of January, when they were trying to pressure me into taking a plan with a contract – the guy was telling me that there is a new law in Israel, that would be going into effect on Feb 1st, whereby communications companies would not be allowed to hold ppl under contract. I then got a manager calling me back trying to pressure me into signing up for this “1 year” contract that would supposedly be automatically voided on Fed 1st – not only did she keep changing the time limit of her offer, but it was a complete lie! There are also services on my acct that I’ve cancelled but am still being billed for. I’m switching to Cellcom once I get up the koach [strength] to deal with it…”

An Update

About a week ago, my mother got a phone call. It was from a lawyer who said he represented Orange. He wanted to know who the owner was and who he could talk to about outstanding invoices. My mother was partially amused, partially amazed. Isn’t it funny that Orange and all cellular phone companies are careful to designate “Contact” people – and suddenly, their own lawyer doesn’t have a clue who to speak to, “do your own work and figure it out,” she told the lawyer.

A few minutes later, my father’s phone rang and my mother answered it, “You again?” the lawyer asked. Again, my mother refused to give him my name or phone number. He called my son next, eventually my husband. He never did call my number.

A week ago, on one day, I received two envelopes from Orange – one was for a bill – the latest they claim we owe them is about 48,000 NIS (about $15,000). Amazingly enough, despite disconnecting 8 phone lines and not using any of the remaining…67 they have magically assigned to us, or bills still hover in the thousands of shekels mark. But the really funny thing was the second envelope. This was from the lawyer who claims we owe over 80,000 NIS.

Meanwhile, we have moved 8 lines to Pelephone and are receiving lower bills and better service – hey, at least they actually answer us and when they say they will call back, they do!

In the meantime, we have identified another name of someone similarly cheated by Orange using the same representative. And so life continues. The lawyer we first discussed the case with won’t work – sadly, our wonder workers seem to have broken up their company. The very helpful one has left; the other refuses to answer our emails. Luckily, we insisted on their writing up their conclusions that we can use in court to details Orange’s faulty and criminal actions.

The Lawyer

We went to our first meeting with the lawyer on Friday. It was a good meeting. He listened, he saw, and the evidence is so amazingly clear. He feels confident that we can easily win on the financial damages, the over-charging, the ridiculous claims of lines we never got, equipment we never received, etc.

That was the easier part. The harder part will be showing the tremendous damage this has done to our family, to our business. That is what the lawyer will now check and do research on and then get back to us.

How do you put value on the agony we have suffered?

The lawyer feels this is so obvious, we could likely get Orange to compensate us for the monetary issues that Gal caused by forgery and fraud, by manipulation and falsehoods. But he also is sure that Orange will never pay for the time they have stolen from us, the endless hours of phone calls begging them to listen, the damages to business and clients. This is not something they will recognize without it going to court.

But it is something that the courts will likely pay attention to – if the judge has elderly parents, she will be infuriated at the dangers of cutting elderly people off without means of communication.

If the judge has a son in the army, the situation in which our son found himself and our inability to call him, will resonate there.

Further, a simple look at the emails and lists of phone calls will be enough to show what Orange has done – in malice, in spite, in indifference.

Before we started this, in the first meeting with the wonder workers, they asked us what we wanted. As I wrote here – all we wanted was for Orange to just release us. Take their stupid phones and their stupid billing and just end our agony. As the Orange manager so eloquently put it, that deal is gone; water under the bridge; ended, over, not on the table.

Now, we told the lawyer, now we go for the damages they caused, for the agony of having made the huge mistake of dealing with them.

No longer towards resolution, now we go for justice.

The Day This Goes to Court

I keep imagining having to explain this whole situation with Orange in court.

“So what happened?” the judge asks.

“Well, we decided to move to Orange. We had 16 Cellcom lines and when the smoke had cleared, we had 74.”

“I’m sorry,” the judge says, “I didn’t hear you. Could you repeat that?”

And so I explain again, that which we cannot understand ourselves. The judge sits there for a moment staring at us. He turns to the lawyers for Orange, sitting there looking so serious with their stacks of paper and their black suits.

“Do you have something to say to this?” the judge asks.

“Your Honor,” says the Orange lawyer, “they signed the contract. Surely they must know what they signed.”

The judge looks at the Orange lawyer. Having signed his own share of these ridiculous contracts, he says, “have you ever read one of these contracts? No one can read them. Did your client take an order for 16 lines and turn them into 74?”

“Well, your honor, there does seem to be 74 lines on the bill and it could be…”

But the judge cuts him off and turns back to us. “How many lines do you have?”

“Well, we have 8 lines and my parents have two lines and a former employee of ours has 5 lines and we have one spare. So 16 lines. And we got phones for all of them – but they are charging us for 49 pieces of equipment.”

“FORTY-NINE?” the judge shouts. Already he turns to the Orange lawyers. “FORTY-NINE? For 16 lines?”

“Your honor,” the Orange lawyer starts again but the judge has already turned to us and instructed us to continue.

“Then there’s the line that was billed thousands of shekels but we never even got it. We don’t have that number. And we agreed to 27 agurot per minute and they charged us 70 agurot.”

The judge looks to the lawyer but before they can say anything, the judge holds up his hand and turns back to us. “go on.”

“And we signed up for a virtual network so there would be limited free calls for everyone within our group, but they never gave us credit for that.

“And they told us we could have 10 free numbers – that would be included in the virtual network and we gave them the numbers, but they never credited us for those calls.

“And they billed us for machines we never got – the proof is that in 16 months, we never used them.

“Oh, and they took my husband’s signature, the electronic one, and they cut and pasted it onto more than 40 pages of a contract without telling us.”

The judge looks at the lawyers as he speaks to me, “they did?”

“Yes, your honor,” I respond. “And they signed my name for me.”

“Really?” says the judge.

“Oh yes, just look at the papers, it’s so obvious even a child can see the obvious fraud,” I continue. “And when we tried to settle it, they shut our phones without any warning.”

By now, the entire courtroom is staring at the Orange lawyers. “No warning?” the judge echoes.

“None – not to our son who is a soldier!” I hear a collective gasp from the people in the room; even the judge looks angry.

“And my elderly parents were cut off and my youngest daughter.

“And my older son is an ambulance volunteer and they need to call him if there is an emergency.

“And my youngest son learns away from home and I couldn’t call him.”

“What did you do?” the judge asked.

“What could I do? I asked Orange to at least open the phones for incoming calls so that we could call the person from another line. Or if my father got separated from my mother, we could call him. But they refused. So we went out and bought new phones for the most critical lines. Then we found these amazing guys who convinced Orange to open a few lines for two weeks while they figured out the accounting and we sent them a letter from a lawyer telling them exactly how much damage they were causing our business and our family – but Orange never even bothered to answer that letter. Finally, we got someone on the line and they agreed they’d open those few lines in 30 minutes. Of course, they messed that up too.”

“Of course they did,” agrees the judge. “What did they do?”

“Well,” I say with my first smile of the day, “they opened one line completely by mistake – in and out calls; and the other lines it took them 3 hours to open for incoming only. But they shut them again after two weeks even to that.

“Oh, and when they didn’t even answer our letter, we did what we said we would – we moved the critical lines to Pelephone and demanded Orange open our phones to other SIM cards. That IS the law,” I told the judge.

“Yes, it is. Can I assume they did not do that?” the judge will ask me.

“Well, it took them days. First they said “maybe tomorrow or Sunday. Then on Sunday they said they meant the NEXT Sunday. Then they opened most of the phones, but not mine.

“So my son had to call them almost every day. They said they wouldn’t open my phone unless I paid what we owe them. I tried to explain that we don’t even OWE them money and about those 74 lines but they didn’t care. So my son really yelled and finally, after three weeks, my phone was unlocked.”

“So,” says the judge as he turns to the Orange lawyers, “we’ve got fraud, forgery, over-billing, lying. Failing to follow Ministry of Communications laws regarding unlocking phones and apparently a representative who doesn’t know how to count,” he says as he turns to Gal, sitting there next to the lawyers. Gal’s face is all red and for once, he isn’t charming and smiling at all.

I could continue this fantasy, but there’s no reason. Soon enough, Orange will hear all of this and more and though I don’t expect any judge in Israel to act as this one does in my story; I have no doubt that the judge will be as disgusted as so many others have been.

The law in Israel requires everyone to do their best to minimize damages – Orange did everything that they could, in spite and malice, to increase the damages. This is true in how they cut our phones; this is true in how they took three weeks to unlock my iPhone.

“Did your client take an order for 16 lines and turn them into 74?” – oh yes, they did. That…and so much more.

I am confident that when this comes to court, a competent judge will see the fraud, the forgery, the lies.

And I am confident that Orange will be stupid enough to let this go to court without offering us a reasonable settlement.

THREE Weeks to Open a Phone

That’s right. According to Israeli law, cellular phone companies have no right to hold your phone hostage. They must now open them for free.

So, as law-abiding citizens, we approached Orange and asked them to open our phones. After weeks of procrastinating and giving us the codes a few at a time and dragging it out, they admitted the truth – they are doing this on purpose. They refused to open my iPhone until I paid my bill.

“You are breaking the law,” I told the support person. “Honestly and truly. And we don’t even OWE Orange money.”

Days later. More calls. Almost daily, my son has been calling and spending endless amounts of time trying to get my phone opened while I walk around with an old phone. I have been carrying my iPhone around for the Contacts. Carrying the new phone to call people.

Finally today, after three full weeks, we finally got my phone opened. It is a small victory but I’ll take it as the first of many to come.

When I first started this battle. All I wanted was for Orange to fix the billing and Gal’s lies. After a while and more damage, I just wanted out.

Tell them to take their stinking phones and their stinking service, I told our wonder workers. I don’t owe them; they don’t have to pay me – just end this agony.

As the manager on the phone nastily told my son the other day in yet another lie (he claimed they had offered to cancel the dozens of lines they incorrectly were charging us for) – that offer is off the table.

I have never, in 50 years of living, been so determined. What Orange has done to us is illegal. But more, it is obscene. It is an abomination, a betrayal of our trust.

It is theft of time, of money. And for once, for once, we will sue them, we will beg the courts to understand the damages they have caused to our lives, to our family, to our business.

Just today, my daughter’s teacher said – I was trying to reach you for a few weeks and couldn’t get through. Orange, I explained – but now things are fine. We are will Pelephone.

“WHAT is with your phone?” a colleague asked me. I am in the midst of planning a national conference. “How can you close your phone?” she asked.

I didn’t close it, I explained – Orange did. I told her about the blog; I told her what Orange had done. Two simple words were her response, “Sue them.”

From here to the next world and back again, I responded.

I Was Wrong

It is with deep astonishment that I admit I have been wrong about Orange all along. I thought they had taken 16 Cellcom lines and somehow miraculously converted them to 66 lines.

I was mistaken and I acknowledge it publicly.

We have the spreadsheet of numbers and there it is…

We have 74 lines, not 66.

Orange, you amaze me. Your miraculous deceit has reached new heights. Not 66 lines – 74. Oh, and for these 74 lines, Gal has claimed we have 49 machines.

49 machines…for 16 people. Amazing.

How Long Does it Take?

How long does it take someone to unlock a phone?

Answer:

Black market: 15 minutes

Cellcom: 1 hour

Orange: 2.5 weeks and counting

Of course, we have the Complaint number for the phone call in which they said they would not unlock the phone until we had paid our bill.

Of course, they would not listen when we explained, AGAIN, that we did not owe them any money.

Of course, they messed up enough to unlock ONE of the iPhones, but not the other.

Of course, of course…they are violating Israeli law by refusing to unlock the phones.

We called on a Thursday, two and a half weeks ago. They said tomorrow, or Sunday at the latest.

That Sunday, they said…no, we meant NEXT Sunday.

On Sunday, they refused unless we paid our bill. Then they reversed themselves and said they would open it…tomorrow.

Today, they said…tomorrow.

So, how long does it take to unlock a phone – at least as long as it takes to get an Orange manager to actually call you back after Orange promises they will…and we have the names of 25 or so people who have promised this and never delivered.

So, tomorrow my phone will be unlocked…or maybe not.