Several weeks ago, I decided to switch to Shaw after many years of being an unhappy Telus customer. Upon cancelling my service, I was surprised to learn that I would be charged a $120 fee for breaking my contract even though my contract should have expired several months prior.

Let me explain...

I entered my most recent three-year contract with Telus in spring 2006. In February 2010, soon after a Telus agent "tweaked" my service to save me about a dollar a month, I received a friendly letter from Telus thanking me for locking in to a new three-year term.

I called customer service, where a friendly female agent insisted she didn't know why a new contract would have been initiated. She assured me she'd remove the three-year obligation from my account.

Imagine my frustration when I was suddenly charged $120 for breaking a contract that I was assured didn't exist!

Several calls to customer service went nowhere. Neither did my first chat with a agent in "Loyalty and Retention."

But it was my second call to L&R that truly revealed how little Telus respected me as a customer.

After reviewing "every phone call I'd ever made to Telus, " the gentleman stated matter-of-factly that there was no record of the call I'd made to protest the new contract. He did, however, see quite clearly that I'd entered a three-year contract in February and would have been told so at the time (I wasn't).

It seemed convenient, I replied, that the only phone call he couldn't find on my extensive file was the one that would corroborate my story. He said nothing. I expressed my frustration and asked if he was basically saying, "Telus wins and you lose." His reply? "Well, I wouldn't use those exact words. But . . ."

I sent a letter to CEO Darren Entiwstle and to Telus customer service. No replies from either. Then, the other day, I received a letter form a collections agency. Nice.

At Telus, the future may be friendly but they sure as heck ain't