No go Amigo

You can't get out of it! Nopes. Once you are in, you are in. I am talking of Vonage phone service that, in my wisdom, I took up 2 years back, hardly ever used it and now I wanted to get rid of it.

I might have made not more than 10 calls on that line in total in 2 years and I was paying monthly bill of around 20$. (Naturally it was auto-debit, as is most of my other bills).

A cursory glance at my statement made me realize why the heck am I even paying these folks.

And then my ordeal began. First of all, you cannot call them on weekends. No. Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.. you just can't. It's too much of a pain for them to 'serve' on the weekends. Of course you *can* buy or renew your contract even at 00:00 hrs in night on Sunday. But you cannot, would not cancel your service.

So you put an alert in your phone to call them on weekday and as Murphy's Law would have it, the alert matches your time of a random office meeting. So you skip it thinking you'd call in lunch.

Many lunches later, you have still not called and again a new statement makes you aware of the 'call of duty'

And finally One day, you connect. Boy! that feeling of 'connection'. You wait for about 4 minutes on the line, keeping your speaker phone and your patience ON. And she shows up. The goddess who's finally going to relieve you of your pain. But she's not going to make it easy to let go. You know it. She knows it.

It's a mind game. "Sir, why do you want to discontinue"; "We can give you 2 months free"; "You know we have a loyalty membership program".

By the 5th question your sugar level is high. You are now 2 inches close to barking! But you know, you want to restrain. You want to first get off the hook somehow. In a strange way these call center guys have too much power.

The Abhimanyu needs a way off the Chakravyuha..

And your patience pays off. You've honored your 2 year contract and now there's no penalty for 'gettin out'... and it feels good. You paid them for 2 years, you din't use much of it, and it actually feels good to get rid of that service that you never used.