I'm mentioned in the National Post today in Kevin Restivo's article about Bell Mobility's recent billing issues.

My blog posts about my dissatisfied experience with Bell Mobility were picked up by Google and became a feedback point for many other dissatisfied people. Through their anecdotes I realised my experience was fairly minor.

I'm thinking my name was used just to give the story a personal angle. There wasn't much to it, really. Here's the text from the start of National Post January 5, 2005 Financial Post section FP6, Bell mired in billing morass (I can't find the article online yet).

Ryan Lowe is an unhappy Bell Mobility customer.

Mr. Lowe, an Ottawa software engineer, did not recieve bills for several months from Bell Canada's wireless arm. When the company finally sent him a bill two months later, he discovered he had been overcharged him[sic] for one month of services.

After months of back-and-forth discussions with Bell, Mr. Lowe, 26, said he was finally able to settle the matter with the company in October.

"It was six months of unnecessary hassles," said Mr. Lowe

...and the article continues, talking about the botched software upgrade from Amdocs. I like how Amdocs uses CMM Level 3. Didn't really help them here.

I think that the parts about me captured the essence of my situation. Unfortunately there are a few factual errors, which I'll chalk up to the over-the-phone interview and bad communication on my part. I'm not used to being interviewed by newspapers and I should have made things more clear.

First, I'm not a software engineer. I may have mistakenly told Mr. Restivo this or confirmed it, but technically I'm not. The Professional Engineers of Ontario want to protect the title "engineer" from dilution and only want licensed professional engineers (P.Eng.) to use it in their job titles. To become a licensed P.Eng. I need to be working for a few years and complete an ethics exam.

It would be more correct to call me a "software engineering graduate" or a "software developer". Sometimes engineers-to-be are called Engineers in Training, or E.I.T.

I didn't have "discussions" with Bell Mobility. I've blogged my experiences already -- in an original post followed by an update and then a second update. It's not too hard to follow my story.

The only time I heard directly from Bell Mobility was when I called their 800 support number last summer and got an automated message saying that the support lines were very busy and that Bell Mobility was experiencing billing issues.

The automated message also promised that things would be cleared up soon and bills would be settled, so rather than wait on the line I decided to just wait a few months to see if things cleared up. They did, but I still didn't hear anything from Bell Mobility about the matter.

I don't remember making that quote about "unnecessary hassles", but I could have. The interview was over the phone. That's fine, I'll take responsibility for it. However I'll add to it: it wasn't only the hassle that was unnecessary, it was the lack of communication. That's what I was mostly unhappy about.

I can understand software problems and the complexity of upgrades, I'm a software engineering graduate. But the general public doesn't care, they just want things to work. When things don't work it would be nice to know why instead of being in the dark.

I'm glad this is getting attention from a software perspective. Technology can affect your company's reputation, so it's important to be careful as well as communicate with your customers when changing your core technology. People won't tolerate anything less -- I know a bunch of people who have switched away from Bell Mobility because of this, and I'm considering it myself.