In reference to my last post, a day before the due date for the payment, I got my salary, checked the bill again, counted the days and realized I’m being billed for approximately 52 days. So that’s almost 2 months already. For 52 days, the modem charges were counted up to 381.33. So the bundled DSL and phone services were billed for 1,778.40. And, (insert deep sigh), apparently, taxes were not part of the charges yet, so they had inserted the EVAT on the bill for 213.41. Now, I finally understood that I’m being charged for almost two months, but what about the one-year free National Direct Dial service?

I decided to just ask the lady over the counter regarding the first bill as well as the NDD service. She explained to me the summary of the charges, confirming my suspicions, then I asked her about my free NDD service. She confirmed that it was free for a full year for national PLDT-to-PLDT calls. Then I asked her why it wasn’t on and told her that we’ve never even used it. We’ve had the service for almost two months and we haven’t even experienced the NDD service.

She gets on the computer and goes, “Aysa, Ma’am ha, ato tan-awon if on na ba inyo NDD…”. In English, “One moment Ma’am, let’s check if your NDD service is already active..”

She presses a few buttons on her keyboard, navigates with the mouse and types in something and then she goes,”Bag-o ra naactivate inyo NDD Ma’am, karon ra jud nga adlawa.”. In English, “Your NDD service has just been activated, just today.”

I was thinking, “Duhhh, because you just activated it.”

It’s been almost two months and they just activated it? It’s too much of a coincidence that I was at the office raising the concern.

I don’t believe in coincidences.

So I paid the bill, went home in a taxi, because I was super tired, had some breakfast and went to bed. Now, let’s see how much the next bill is going to cost me.