What is 35 minutes and 12 seconds?

Before we left Ulukhaktok, Ev & I needed to deal with our satellite service. I had attempted to deal with it on my own, but since Ev’s name was the one on the account, our service provider, who shall remain nameless, would not allow me to make any changes to our account.

The day before the movers arrived, Ev called. Now you would think our request relatively simple but there were definitely a couple of questions that required their expertise. Rather than pack our receivers and two dishes, we opted to sell them to the incoming member. He is not slated to arrive for several months, so the equipment would be awaiting his arrival. This is fairly common practice amongst the members and I suspect it is a fairly common question posed to the satellite company. So, firstly we wanted to enquire how to transfer the equipment over to his name. Secondly, we wanted to know whether we needed to cancel the account in Ulukhaktok and open a new one when we arrived in PEI – the underlying question...is the account tied to the piece of equipment – or could we suspend our service until we had the opportunity to purchase a new device and reinstitute service. All fairly yes or no answers, right? Apparently not.

I stood-by listening to Ev explain, in plain English, what we wanted to do. I stood by and listened while he re-explained for the second time what we wanted to do, this time with a little more frustration. When he corrected the customer service person on how to pronounce McLachlan, I knew things were not headed in a good direction. He re-explained a third time and told the customer service rep he could not understand what she was suggesting. Not so much that there was a language barrier, but because what she was telling him was not making sense. In a fit of fury, he finally told her that he could not understand what the hell she was talking about and advised that before he loses his temper on her, he is going to pass the phone over to me with the hopes that I can determine what it is she is talking about.

I get on the phone. She calls me Mrs. McLawlan. I correct her. I explain what my husband does for a living, that we are being transferred, and that the person replacing him, who will not be here for several months, is purchasing the equipment from us. This should have been simple because the CS rep I spoke with several days earlier advised that all we had to do was leave the replacement member’s name on our account and advise the replacement what name we had on our account under to make the connection. That’s it. This CS rep agreed...and called me Mrs. McLawlan. I corrected her. I also learned from my earlier conversation that you are required to give a full month’s notice when you cancel an account or pay a full month without service. (I digress here, but I was told it was in the contract we signed and when I pulled that out, it referred you back to their website for the terms and conditions which I suspect are updated frequently and without printing a copy off 3 years ago, we didn’t have anything to fall back on.) She said the other option was to suspend our service without penalty (this she stated numerous times) but that accounts had to be suspended for a minimum of 6 weeks. “But Mrs. McLawlan, you cannot suspend an account without an active piece of equipment tied to your account.” I advised that the equipment remaining behind would/could be tied to our account as it was going to be sitting unused for several months. We could remove the old equipment from our account and replace it with the newly purchased equipment and establish service. She repeated that we couldn’t suspend our account without a piece of equipment tied to our account. I repeated myself. Are you getting the picture here? Once she understood what I was saying we started to discuss the suspension again.

The CS rep advised that the minimum for a suspension was 6 weeks but that when we arrived in PEI, all we had to do was call and they would reconnect our service earlier than the 6 weeks. I agreed that sounded like a good plan. She then restated the suspension was an option, without charge, but it was for a minimum of 6 weeks. I repeated what she told me moments before-hand about suspending & it and calling in for an earlier reinstatement. She agreed and then put me on hold for a moment. When she came back on the line, she said, “Mrs. McLawlan....”. I corrected her, “I’m sorry, Mrs. McLachlan. Mrs. McLawlan, there is a fee of $10 or $15 to suspend your account.” “But you said before there was no fee?” “I was mistaken, Mrs. McLawlan.” “Fine.”, says Mrs. McLawlan. “So, Mrs. McLawlan, six weeks from now would be October 14th, shall set that as the end of your suspension?” I questioned her again about the early reinstatement. She repeated herself about the minimum of six weeks. I said, “What about the early reinstatement?” She said, “Call us when you arrive to reinstate your service earlier, but there is a six week minimum, Mrs. McLawlan”. That was the last straw. I vehemently told her that I wanted to speak to a supervisor and that we were moments away from cancelling our service with them altogether. I repeated back to her what she was saying and said that they were two totally different things and wondered if she understood that? She said she did. Finally I got it out of her that they needed to have a date entered into their system for reinstatement which couldn’t be set any earlier than the 6 weeks, but we were welcome to call back when we arrived and have our service reinstated.

Finally! As we were nearing the end of our conversation, she posed the question. “Mrs. McLawlan...”, to which I replied, “MRS. MCLACHLAN!!!” “I’m sorry, Mrs. McLawlan, is there anything else I can do for you today?” To which Everett and I started laughing, SERIOUSLY out loud. And my reply laced with sarcasm, “NO, THANK YOU”.

So what is 35 minutes and 12 seconds? It’s the time we spent on the phone trying to get the answer to a few simple questions. It is 35 minutes and 12 seconds off our lives that we will never get back. And it probably shortened our lifespan by an additional few minutes because of the stress and frustration we were forced to endure.

I think I need to subtract an additional minute once again. Revisiting this story has made me relive the experience all over again.