Shouldn't the automatic payment be AUTOMATIC?

Okay. Two things that made me angry TODAY and AT THE SAME TIME!

Here in the US they also have the automatic debt payment. You can put your utilities, internet and cable TV provider, telephone (including mobiles), credit cards bills and even your rental to be paid automatically via checking account (or even via credit card sometimes).

• AT&T Wireless Prepaid Cell Phone Automatic-refill

When I was in Brazil, I had a prepaid cell phone and sometimes I forgot to put credits on it and my wife always complained about that because she was unable to reach me. Fair enough.

Here in the US I have a prepaid cell phone and AT&T provides the Automatic-Refill service. You can choose some options at the Automatic-Refill service like "once in a week", "twice in a week", "once in a month", "twice in a month" and "when you run out of minutes". And then you can choose how much credit you want varying from US$15.00 to US$100.00 (note: US$15.00 expires in 30 days and US$20.00 expires in 90 days).

As I am scarcely using the cell phone (less than US$75.00 in 6 months, i.e. less than US$13.00/month!!!), I thought that it would be nice to have added US$20.00 whenever I run out of minutes and so I subscribed to it.

Then today my credits ran down to US$0.14 and with such credit I can't place nor receive any call. Fair enough. However the US$0.14 can be used DURING a conversation, so for AT&T I still have minutes to talk and because of that they didn't refilled my credits automatically! This is a CATCH 22 because I am not able to place or receive ANY call with US$0.14!!

After realizing that, I just canceled my subscription to that service and refilled the credits by myself.

• RCN (Internet and Cable TV provider) Automatic Bill Payment

Because of this issue, I went online to check the NSTAR utility and RCN bills. NSTAR was fine, being debted accordingly. When I was checking RCN, I have realized that they were billing me more than twice the usual. And it comes that the automatic payment didn't happen last month!!! You see, there was one previous automatic payment for April and it was done correctly. But the automatic payment for May just didn't happen!!!

Now I have sent an e-mail to the Customer Services in order to check what happened and probably I shall make the payment manually every month in order to be sure that such thing doesn't happen again.

For goodness sake, this is not a Third-World country!!! Things should be easier here in the US...

Those things really make me angry...