I’ve often referred to my “banned companies” list. This is a list I keep of companies that have caused me sufficient harm that I refuse to do business with them.
A few companies have been put on the list and then taken off again, usually because they improve or enough time passes.
However, two have done me sufficient wrong to earn lifetime bans:
- Rogers: These anti-competitive frackers have screwed everyone for so long that they have their own popular hate site: http://www.ihaterogers.ca – That alone says something. My personal vendetta is for them cutting off my Internet years ago for “using too much bandwidth” back when they I had their “unlimited” plan.
Apparently they thought they could advertise “unlimited”, then make a limit – but not tell you what the limit was, or how much you had used – just that you used too much and that you should cut back some amount, or your service will remain suspended – with no refund.
Yes, this was really their policy back in 2003. And since then, they’ve just become worse and worse – charging more money and offering less bandwidth and service. In 10 years, they’ve singlehandedly pushed Canada from being #1 in the world for broadband access to almost dead last. That’s right, thanks to Rogers, Canadian Internet access is worse than some African countries. - CIBC: These jerks are the worst of a bad bunch – the big 5 colluding Canadian banks. Aside from being involved in major shady deals like Enron and subprime mortages, they really pissed me off back in 2001 when my student loans became due. I had two loans – one through the Ontario government, and one from the Federal government. Once I graduated, they both became due and I received two separate notices with the balances owed, which I promptly paid. What I didn’t know was that through some sort of adminstrative procedure (supposedly due to how the program was administered) a portion of my Ontario loan had been split off into a separate account.
Even though I had faithfully updated my contact information over the years, this split account somehow managed to get outdated contact information associated with it and they apparently couldn’t contact me to let me know it was due. So they let this separate account accumulate interest for a full year (almost exact to the date) and then sent it to a collection agency. The collection agency magically manages to find my up-to-date contact information right away, and informs me that I owe them the original balance plus 1 year’s interest plus a collection fee.
Just an adminstrative screwup? Perhaps – except that I heard the exact same story from several other students. Nice little scam they had going there, “losing” people’s contact information for a year.