We've had our phone through bellsouth for 18 yrs. In jan 2007 we ran into some bad financial problems and got behind $450. on our phone bill. They disconnected, they had no choice. So we pay it at a place in cash where it immediately credits our acct. The lady we paid told us the phone should be on within the hr... 5 hrs later, still no phone. I drive to a pay phone. The tech. explained we didn't pay the reinstallment fee. Then she added that I had a choice: to pay it then or allow them to put it on the next mths bill. I picked the latter. Okay 2 days and we still have a dead phone. I again drive to another pay phone and this tech. says that no the reinstallment fee must be paid before phone is activated. Now, which is it? That could have been really bad had I had a sick family member and needed the phone in case there was news about that sick family member. Thats just plain carelessness that could really hurt one of their paying customer. Okay, I pay the reinst. fee and our phone is on. I try to get online but my DSL green internet light isn't coming on at all. I pull out manuals and start troubleshooting for 9 hours. Next morning I call old BellSouth and they say that I have to call the DSL bellsouth people to let them know our phone is connected again! Now the average person would never think you'd have to do that. Okay now the real problem: since we have financial problems I call bellsouth and tell them I need to downsize my service. Tell her I need caller id, but do I have to have that whole pckg.: call return, call waiting, etc. She says no and tells me the monthly chg for just having caller id. I said to change me to that. then I tell her I want the 10cents a min. long distance plan which with reg. phone srv., taxes, wiring (all that junk I don't have a clue what is that added each mth to your bill) fast internet dsl, the new price she quoted me against our usual plan would be $142 cheaper than what we'd had. Okay, next mth. there has been no changes made to my phone. Same old bill. I made sure they had not prorated the bill for the time we had used the old service until the new plan had taken affect, but no changes made at all. So my brother in law Bob Darby calls and instructs you to take the caller id off, give us the 10 cent a min. long distance and reg.phone srv. and made it real clear that they'd better get it right this time. For 3 days caller id is gone, so we figure bs finally got the msg. suddenly caller id is on our phone again and the next bill is the same old bill. Now we paid 50 dollars March 2nd and were 8 days late on the rest and our phone is off again. If we had ever gotten the cheaper service that we've been trying to get for 3 mths the phone bill would had been paid in time. What is up with Bellsouth. I know they know their competition is probably much better-but we deserve an explanation why they took it upon their selves 2 times to change our bill back to the more expensive one when we instructed them to change it to a whole different cheaper plan! For sure we are changing our service this time but we also feel we should be compensated in some way by BellSouth. In fact my husbands brother is contacting is atty friend to see if we have any type of law suit against bellsouth. Thanks for my venting and if you can suggest what we might do, we really appreciate. d.darby