Matt isn’t big on text messaging, which is why he says Verizon has assaulted him with robocalls to get him to get in on the labor-intensive, thumb-cramping, erratic driver-inspiring phenomenon.

He hasn’t been able to throw the Cylon salesmen off his tail. He writes:

My wife and I signed up for Verizon cell service last week and have been pretty happy so far. Starting Monday, my wife noticed that we were getting a nightly call from 888-453-1960 with a caller ID of “TOLL FREE CALL”. The robocaller was leaving us empty 5 second voicemails, with no identification. Using http://whocalled.us, I found out it was probably Verizon and called them. I asked why they called and after verifying my info, they told me it was “regarding an overage on my account”. The overage? 1 text message, at a cost of $0.20. I explained that I didn’t have a text plan on purpose ($5/mo * 2 phones) and that since I only get about 5 texts a month, I didn’t need one. I asked them to stop calling me, but the rep stated that the calls were “computer generated” and that I could not opt out of finding out about my twenty cent overage. I would like to know if my wife’s limited data plan started going seriously over, but 1 text message? Are they going to call me every time I get one?

The evil corporate genius side of me thinks that the main purpose of this harassment seems to be to convince me to get a text message plan, the consumer side figures that someone complained about not being warned when their daughter sent 23,000 messages in a month. Regardless I’d like to either opt-out completely or set some kind of threshold, neither of which seems to be an option.

If you know how to stop the Verizonbots — perhaps a well-targeted EMP? — let us know.

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