Billing customers for internal project management is a bad idea.

There’s a new phenomena in the service invoice category. Imagine this: Your company scores an account set for major growth. It could go from being a $10k account to $150k within a year. When scheduling your internal resources to work on this account and scheduling meetings or conference calls with the client you employ a “Project Manager”. Then you bill the customer back for this “Project Managers” time.

Sounds fantastic until the customer gets the invoice. Four hours @ $120+ per hour for “Project Management”??? Okay, where’s the Project Control document, the Gantt chart? Where is any deliverable at all? Where is there any value add to the customer what-so-ever for the hours you billed them to cover the cost of an internal resource scheduler? This is exactly what NWN Corporation tried to pass off to me over the last couple of weeks as billable work. I told them I would not pay another dime towards the salary of their internal project or resource planners. In fact there seems to be some confusion within some service providers these days as to what the title Project Manager means.

Yep, part of project management is resource scheduling. But unless you are scheduling THE CUSTOMERS RESOURCES you are providing precisely ZERO billable services to the customer. You are doing nothing but charging your Project Manager’s salary back to the customer. Put it in a scenario: I on a security component installation company. Imagine I win a contract to install 100 security cameras. Then imagine that I employ a Project Manager to come up with an INTERNAL project plan and schedule techs for the field. Now imagine I present that persons work as a line item on a bill to the client. WHAT? Why should any customer be forced to pay for someone to create our internal project control documentation and schedule when our techs will be on the job? Absurd. Next up, we will bill by the hour for the work our HR reps do in hiring the staff to do the work. Why not just go all the way to putting a line item for the Receivable Manager’s time to prepare the invoice? How about the janitor? I mean technicians have to pee right? Might as well bill back for toilet cleaning as a line item.

How about learning the difference between internal Project Management and genuine Project Management services for the customer. Nobody owes you a dime for the cost you incur for scheduling your staff or for a non technical person to listen in on conference calls.

Ripped off on Amazon. Bought a $3100+ switch. Received an End of Life 7 year-old switch worth $50

And Amazon couldn’t help despite the same thing happening to others according to reviews of the same seller called MC_A2. We shelved the switch upon receipt in February, intending to deploy it later in the year. The box had a UPC Code on it that said “Cisco CS_3850”. We ordered a 3850. When we finally opened the box we received a Cisco 2950, a switch that’s been End of Life for over 6 years.

So I called Amazon to let them know of the bait and switch. Another reviewer “Ron S.” had the exact same review in January 2018. Bought a 3850, got a 2950 in a 3850 box. The seller MC_A2 had a review history of shipping the wrong product going back to 2015. I failed to read these reviews, my fault. However, with such a review history why does this person still have an active Amazon seller account? Seems Amazon does as much policing of it’s sellers as it does the counterfeit merchandise all over their site. We canceled our Prime account on July 7th and I was considering re-subscribing. Not now, not ever. I will never purchase another item from Amazon ever. They are proving to be as dangerous as the early days of eBay and I let their customer service know. Notice how they point me to the manufacturer for a solution when this was a 3rd party reseller account. Amazon’s response wasn’t even competent.

“Hello Amy,

I’m sorry to hear your Cisco Catalyst WS-C3850-48P-S Ethernet Switch was not as expected. In my experience, the quickest way to have this issue resolved is to contact the manufacturer directly. You can find the manufacturer’s contact information here:

The manufacturer may require a proof of purchase, such as an invoice, before they’ll send you a replacement part. You can view and print an invoice for your order from this link:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/summary/print.html?orderID=114-9803718-8015459

If you’ve contacted the manufacturer and they can’t help, please send us a summary of that correspondence and we’ll work on another solution.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the buttons below to vote about your experience today.

Best regards,
Kyla O.
Amazon.com”

“It’s quite alright. We canceled our Prime account on July 7th anyway and won’t be back. $3100+ is a real punch from a bait and switch seller with a review history of ripping people off while Amazon allows to continue to sell with a 100% negative rating in 2018, bait and switch review history going back as far as 2015. I am also the IT Director for (retracted) out of NC. That’s who I procured the switch for. I will no longer be buying anything on Amazon for the organization either. Not so much as a phone case. With a history of not catching counterfeit products, a proven ability to be ripped off as easily as the early days of Ebay, reports of horrible working conditions for employees I cannot understand Amazon’s success. Pop culture success is all it comes down to, just like Apple. Inferior but praised by the masses. I’ll tell this story in full, with proof of how I (we) were ripped off by an Amazon Seller in hopes it will discourage anyone else from shopping on the site. I know you laugh at such assertions with full Amazon arrogance but I can assure you it will make at least a few people reconsider their unjustified faith in your website. And after all is hyped to the max that’s all it is, a retail website. One that is increasingly difficult to sell through (ya, I support AS2 EDI connections to Amazon for reseller accounts as well) and now has proven it is less secure for buyers than many, many other retail sites. Such as serversupply.com where I just procured the replacement switch. I’ll think of Amazon as I’m throwing the 7 year old unit we lost $3100 on into the trash. Then I’ll post this reply to customer service on my blog as warning to others that YES, it is possible to be completely ripped off on wonderful Amazon without recourse”.

And a follow up:

“Oh and by the way I did contact Cisco, the manufacturer.  Why would they help?  Why would they know what the hell I’m talking about?  This bait and switch product came from a 3rd party reseller, MC_A2, who has nothing to do with Cisco.  A reseller you continue to allow to sell on your site despite a review history of bait and switch.  This is a matter of Amazon policing sellers about as well as you police for counterfeit products.  You rely on 3rd party sellers for 40% of your sales and it seems as long as you get your percentage you don’t care who they’re ripping off – let ’em hang out and play right?”

Do NOT use Mountain Bike Trails as a promotional gimmick for Real Estate Development.

I don’t think home building companies realize how much damage they are doing to themselves by trying to use what they perceive as a mountain biking “trend” as a marketing gimmick.  I know of three developments nationally where the home builder offered mountain biking trails as a community perk only to shutter the trails within months as they used the land to expand development.  Now I’m not gonna get into how pathetic these over-priced, poorly built track homes are with regards to quality of construction and components (a $3700 laminate double door option, really?).  Regardless of their lack of any real wood I suppose some people are drawn to pay a premium for a house built 10 feet from their neighbor for a sense of “community”.  But when you build mountain bike trails you’ve immediately extended beyond your “community”.

Build all the barn style coffee houses you want beside the community pool.  Who cares.  If you build mountain bike trails word will get out.  We live to explore new trails.  All great for your marketing right?  Yes.  Incredible.  As long as you plant to NEVER remove the trails to expand development of more shot ass homes on the land.  Once you do that, you’re BLACKLISTED.

Blacklisted?  Yep.  A shit community.  Traitors.  Word’s getting out about Wendell Falls.  I suppose they don’t care because demand for their boring track cardboard is so high they destroyed trails they marketed as the second coming of Christ to the area in April 2017.  “Future expansion” they said.  Nope.  Just destroyed trails after one season of riding.  No communication about the trails status.  Just people arriving to find them gone.  Now they can sell all the ghetto fabulous, cheap material track homes they can build due to demand.  We will not forget.  You’ll never have a serious cyclist interested in your matchstick dwellings.  Wendell Falls is blacklisted.  To hell with posers and marketing dim bitches who think this is trend to us.  It’s a lifestyle and you’re a tease for profit.  A teasing whore in a coffee shop barn.  A total misfire.  You DO NOT fuck around by building trails with so much social media and LBS fanfare only to rip them down.  You will lose sales and credibility as anything but development whores for such nonsense.  The cycling community is much bigger than yours.

Why “Geo-targeted” social media advertising will not work for most small firms.

Has your business been offered the opportunity to run “geo-targeted” social media ads by a small, local digital marketing firm?  This is a simple enough concept in printed media, run an ad in a publication exclusive to Atlanta, GA and an audience in that area sees it.  This is quite a bit different when it comes to social media and it’s track record for small businesses is abysmal.  It’s a matter of those pushing the product, smaller social media digital marketing firms, not understanding the underlying technology and it’s limitations.

Digital geo-marketing relies primarily on data collected by a couple of firms in attempts to obtain legitimacy.  Maxmind and Digital Envoy TRY to collect geo-location data using ping responses.  Ya, if you’re a network admin go ahead and laugh.  Ping data.  “Pinging” IP addresses is a technology older than the World Wide Web.  It’s a command used to identify latency times between computers and network appliances.  On wired and private networks these ping response times measuring latency are pretty reliable.  On public networks and more specifically mobile networks ping latency is far less reliable when it comes to pinpointing IP address locations.  It’s literally a guessing game, full of of too many assumptions to list.  Even the geo-location companies admit it’s “a bit like solving a mystery”.

Geo-location companies do not know with any precision where an ISP is delivering an address, certainly not with any accuracy down to 30km or less, just over 20 miles.  Most often that level of accuracy cannot be achieved.  So the smaller the area you want to target your advertising, the less likely it is any marketing will reach that designated audience.  If you want to advertise in the entire state of GA exclusively, you might get the results you’re looking for.  Maybe.  Assuming none of the internet service providers re-address or redesign their network in a broad area.

There are other limiting factors in using IPv4 internet addresses to try to identify audience locations.  Many ISPs, especially those in Asia and Europe are switching to IPv6 public network addresses, abandoning IPv4 entirely, the address model used by these geo-data aggregation firms.  Spectrum Communications is doing this in the US now.  This is not information digital media marketing firms want you to know.  The geo-targeted marketing they are trying to sell is an inaccurate science, relying on assumed information and technology that is becoming more irrelevant every day.

All that said geo-targeted marketing is possible and is currently working for several large enterprise organizations.  I say “enterprise” because I am referring to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other organizations which have millions to spend on entire departments to make sense out of network addresses and their delivered locations using Ping Triangulation, a sophisticated and manual process.  For example Google uses cars in every major metropolitan city in the world to triangulate and confirm IP addresses and subnets delivered by local ISPs to subscribers.  They do not provide this collected information to third parties, not even for a price.  Google will target your ad geographically for you at their rates.

So unless your local digital media marketing firm has a few cars checking IP addresses on a daily basis in every market you may wish to advertise it’s likely they are working off bad and inaccurate data.  Of course they won’t tell you this which is why my opinion is that most, but not all, digital marketing firms should be relegated to the same receptacle as the stale and now irrelevant firms still pushing search optimization, SEO, the trash bin.

Allpro sells out to SPS Commerce

Just received notice that the Allpro paint buying group sold out to the SPS Commerce ransom plan. They’ve handed over their vendor base information to the company that sees fit to inject itself into the middle of the customer/vendor relationship for revenue. Personally I’d cut off any and all customers necessary to insure SPS never sees a dime of money. Congratulations to the Allpro buying group for being another in the long list of SPS Commerce sellouts.

Startup Incubators or Expensive Cliques?

Over the past couple of months I visited a few startup incubators in the Chicago, Cleveland and Raleigh Durham areas.  After the first all the tours were very familiar.  “Free breakfast”, not surprising since most of the marketing for these incubators look like coffee shop ads.    “High speed broadband”.  Not sure how that matters, a commercial circuit to the internet isn’t that expensive in the scheme of things when starting a business.  “Shared conference rooms” and “multiple geographic locations” are all part of the common script too.

If you think that your companies success is going to be achieved by treating life like a social media feed, an incubator membership might be for you.  Should you believe your gateway to sales and revenue is through those in skinny jeans, with man purses man purses, possibly wearing a RomperHim man romper then I’d say it’s time to incubate your startup.  Office walls and privacy are for old men who didn’t know the value of sharing their startup secrets.  There was nothing comfortable about taking a tour with 20 somethings who peered into every glass walled, fishbowl office to try to study what was on the screens of those working in these hipster palaces.

What was truly staggering was the amount of “private” work space offered. 384 sq. feet for $3000 a month!  Fishbowl space you claim can hold seven employees?  My day job office is 192 sq. feet and I’m in it alone.  But oh, you provide the furniture.  The same furniture I can get from a failed startup on Craigslist for a few hundred dollars.  By the way, these work spaces are a damn sight from anything that can be called “private”.

But who needs any quiet, private places to be productive when you can be “collaborating”?  That is, discussing stale technology topics and up and coming video games with trendy hipsters.  Funny truth is my business partners thought I would be the one susceptible to the temptation of day wasting at the coffee counter, discussing the DSL router I put in Evander Holyfield’s house in 1999 with kids half my age.  They may not be wrong.

Truth is I did not see one thing in these incubator offices, including one called Industrious, that would lead us to be the least bit productive or industrious.  In fact you can’t get “industrious” at all.  It would be too distracting for those trying to fill their glass cubicle walls with doodles that will impress the next tour group.  Every incubator came off as a place to showboat.  So I looked into success stories.  All I saw anywhere was the lists of “Funding Achieved”.

So, an incubator is a place to go get people to invest in your startup?  What if I’m not looking for a place to lure investors?  We’ve committed to making sure we have very limited investment and as few loans as possible.  A financial business model derived from a good friend, Scott McClaughlin, who founded Strategic Connections in Raleigh and has never taken on a dime of debt in the companies history.  Scott wrote a personal check a few years ago to buy the Albemarle Yacht company.  Debt driven valuations are not success.  Sales and revenue with solid margin equals success.  I don’t hear about any such thing coming out of incubators.  The only thing I heard or saw in these incubators were sales pitches, pipe dreams and yes, skinny jeans.

Did we totally dismiss the idea of ever being in an incubator?  Sure did.  There is no math that works in their favor and we’ve honestly found many offices that work better for us than these trendy clubhouses for millennials to play pretend entrepreneur.   Give me one story of incubator startup success beyond “funding achieved” and I’ll reconsider the ridiculousness of this new real estate trend.  And that’s all these things are, real estate marketing to those with the unrelenting desire to feel cool through debt, regardless of genuine business success.

NC Income Tax Offset Inquiries

Here is the NCDOR unit to contact to see if you have an offset that could reduce or delay your NC tax return:

Distribution Unit Employees and Addresses

The Mailing Address for the Unit is:

Distribution Unit
P. O. Box 871
Raleigh, NC 27602
The Distribution Unit is located in the Revenue Building at 501 North Wilmington Street, Raleigh, North Carolina 27604.

Questions about a debt offset – Telephone: 919-814-1119

Most Americans don’t understand what “healthcare cost” means. Not even our representatives.

I keep hearing talking heads in the media refer to “healthcare cost” as being synonymous with the price of health insurance premiums.  This means only one thing: these professional “analysts” are as out of touch as most Americans about the cost of healthcare.

The price of your insurance premium is not the “cost of healthcare”.  It’s the price of your personal insurance determined by a number of factors, most specifically, where you work.  In order to get this real price you have to factor in deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, premiums payments.  There are many variants based on employer and plan.  That’s your price of being insured.

If you think the price of your insurance is bad, or maybe you don’t if your employer is kind and hasn’t jacked your premiums to absurd levels, the cost of healthcare is an insane number.  Rising annually at 8 times the rate of inflation.  Let’s put that into perspective:

Most people have health insurance and auto insurance.  If you wrecked your new Nissan Sentra in 1997 the cost of a replacement front bumper was about $430 installed.  20 years later the cost to replace the front bumper on a new Nissan Sentra is about $642.64 adjusted for inflation, true cost researched… $612.00 installed.  So the cost of replacing a bumper on this particular car has actually gone down verses the rate of inflation.  But still car insurance premiums have risen.  More drivers, more wrecks, most cars don’t enjoy such affordable parts as a Nissan Sentra.  The overall reason for the rising cost of auto premiums is also…. healthcare!  But the example will work regardless.  Because of the somewhat stable cost of car repairs (labor and parts) and increasing safety mechanisms in cars, auto insurance premiums have managed to stay within a reasonable scope of consumer expectations.  Auto insurers don’t have to charge more to make money because their costs aren’t rising exponentially.

What if I told you that because of an increasing number of car crashes, plus increasing cost of replacement parts from the manufacturers and the workload presented to shops it was now going to cost you $8000 to replace the bumper on your new $19K Nissan Sentra?  Most people would cry foul on the part of all those involved: bad drivers, greedy manufacturers and the body shops.  Now imagine most of this increase comes from the rapid, unexplained, increasing price of the replacement parts.  Does that make it better?

Now lets look at health insurance.  Those evil health insurance companies raising premiums right?  They’re “increasing your healthcare cost”.  WRONG.  The insurance companies are certainly increasing your premiums.  Health insurance companies are not the ones increasing the cost of health care.  Unlike my hypothetical example of a fictitious increase in the price of car parts, the exponentially increasing cost of health care products and services are very real.  Especially in the world of pharmaceutical and medical devices.  I worked for Glaxo Smith Kline.  When pharma companies tell Americans we have to pay up to 20 times more for the same medication as other nations to cover their research and development cost THEY LIE.

I’ve personally witnessed almost $1 million US dollars spent on an IT pharmaceutical initiative to decide not to proceed, scrap it.  I’ve seen millions spent on application development that could have been done at half the price with half the bureaucracy.  Then add the increasing cost at the provider level.  Last month my wife received a bill from an outpatient procedure that lasted under 30 minutes.  There was a $1600 “facility fee” as a line item charge.  We’ve asked but still haven’t received explanation as to what this fee really is.  If the “medical billing specialists” for the hospital cannot tell us, who can?

Billing at most medical facilities has transformed into an open ended contract to gouge patients in the United States.  $20 for a Tylenol, $8 for the paper cup it’s delivered in.  All of it has been joked about like the US governments $3000 toilet seats.  But it’s not funny.  Right now health insurance companies are going out of business due to the ACA.  The math doesn’t work.  Imagine telling the auto insurance industry they can’t increase premiums for bad drivers, all other drivers will have to cover the cost for those who wreck twice a year.  And hypothetically imagine the parts manufacturers raising their costs by 500% in the next 4-6 years and then telling the insurers they can’t increase premiums.  That’s almost exactly what is happening to the health insurers, they’re being told they can’t adjust for special conditions or the rising cost of the bills they receive from hospitals.

We don’t hear our politicians or much of the public yell and scream about the rising cost of health care at the provider level.  The “free market” is supposed to handle it all according to our stalwart, conservative Wall Street pundits.  Free market?  In what “free market” do we sign a contract stating we will pay before any service is rendered without first being presented with the price?  What other “free market” product do we consume that in the middle of life or death situations?

From Injury to Insult

So now we just accept that it must be costing these hospitals a fortune for these services they render.  Who cares… insurance companies pay it right?  Those hospitals are struggling so much that they need a prescription of architecture!  Yep, architecture.  Next time you’re in an ambulance make sure the hospital you’re going to has a large marble foyer and uncomfortable retro furniture.  Not the ER waiting room, the lobby.  Don’t forget to check on how many million dollar water fountains are out front.  I’m told water fountains do miracles for dislocated shoulders.  Make sure you’re in a hospital that sponsors a holiday “festival of lights” around Christmas time.  Make sure it costs them hundreds of thousands to put on as a marketing scam because you know, hospitals need to advertise.  Why do hospitals have marketing departments anyway?  If there’s anything I don’t care about feeling institutional personally, it’s a hospital.

And now for the insult.  Somewhere sitting in a $20,000 recliner there is a person very happy to be making big money off Americas declining health.  The ever loving, business savvy, investment driven shareholder.  Oh yes, don’t think for a minute I’ve left out the reason for the profit motive.  Yes, go on and rant about the health insurance CEO’s ten million dollar salary.  Peanuts compared to the earnings of a Saudi Prince who hold’s a tight position in Healthcare Corporation of America, the nations largest for-profit healthcare provider.  Who was it that founded HCA?  Oh… that’s right.  None other than the father of Republican Bill Frist, three term Senator from Nashville.

While for-profit insurance companies are a problem in the health care equation, having started a price gouging war with providers, they are far from the reason Americans pay more for healthcare with lesser outcomes than any other nation.  Look no further than your next prescription bottle or emergency room bill.  The costs are outrageous and climbing as these entities gouge consumers for returns to shareholders.  Nothing demands stakeholder capitalism more than healthcare.  Before you comment regarding the pay doctors, nurses and providers receive learn the difference between compensation and profit in stakeholder economics.

The concerning part is the silence.  You don’t hear many legislators talking about the real reason behind the rising cost of care because the industry is big money.  One thing any elected official in America will not work against is big money.  It is the nations Achilles heel and it’s going to get cut, we’re going to fall.  The majority of financiers, accountants and mathematicians agree: single payer is the only way to stop the end of the US economy.  It’s the only math that works.  Remove the profit motives from healthcare and we will survive as a nation.

Federal Universal Service Fund “Administrative Fees”

It seems commercial customers of major telecommunications companies (that would be most American businesses) are now mostly subject to the carriers collection of the cost of their required contribution to the Federal Universal Service Fund.  This is a fund that is supposed to reimburse or pad the cost of telecommunications expansion into rural areas where service would often not be available due to profitability in the market.  So let’s first define how absurd this fee is to begin with.

Say we have a small rural community area 100 miles from their nearest metropolitan neighbor.  It has a population of less than 800 people and no local ISP’s or broadband providers.  A telco carrier (Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, Windstream) may not find a return on investment to run fiber lines into this community so many miles from their nearest C.O. (central office).  If there is a close breaking point for profitability, over the course of say 5 years, the carrier may choose to build the infrastructure for service but then seek a subsidy from the Universal Service Fund.  So the money from the fund pads the carrier until a term of profitability can be reached.

All well and good to insure rural areas can get high speed broadband.  If that were actually happening.  Truth is that even with USF subsidies available most carriers are skipping out on rural infrastructure development, leaving most of these areas at the mercy of satellite broadband services that are expensive and still prone to latency.  Then comes the revenue generator created by industry and FCC, i.e. government, collusion: The FUSF Administrative Fee.

This fee is passed on by the carriers to consumers and companies for the “cost of collecting” the carriers required contribution to the fund from their customers.  It ranges by carrier, while not likely arbitrary it is left up to the individual carriers calculations.  A calculation I’d imagine surpasses the actual “cost” of collection which is left to a programmed formula in an ERP or accounting system to be places on invoices.

The FCC’s website titled “Understanding your telephone bill” implies carriers cannot charge more than the percentage cost of their contribution to the USF for interstate customers, typically businesses.

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/understanding-your-telephone-bill

“Companies cannot collect an amount that exceeds the percentage of their contribution to the USF”.

But what about the “Administrative USF Fee” put in place by almost all major carriers now?  Verizon charges .41% of the total bill.  AT&T, the worst offender, charges .88%.  For clarification as to how this could not be considered a cost that “exceeds the percentage of their contribution to the USF” I inquired with the FCC.  Here is my original email and their response.  Notice their response has no way for a consumer to make an inquiry.  This is a pinnacle example of corporate backed government bureaucracy.  It’s also a clear example of why we need to get industry insiders out of regulatory oversight and make sure no one in government can become beholden to later opportunities in industries they are supposed to be regulating.

From: Todd Singleton
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2016 11:51 AM
To: FCC504 <FCC504@fcc.gov>
Subject: USF Collection Fees

On the following FCC web site titled “Understanding Your Telephone Bill” you have a section regarding Universal Service Fund contributions by carriers.  It is widely known many carriers pass this cost on to customers however, I am looking for clarification on the “Administrative Fee” carriers add to the bill for the cost of collecting this fund contribution from customers.  https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/understanding-your-telephone-bill

On the page you have the following comment:

“Companies cannot collect an amount that exceeds the percentage of their contribution to the USF”.

By passing through the administrative cost of collections are they not doing precisely that?  Please clarify the position of the FCC on the matter of this administrative collection cost for USF contributions and since no limit or percentage is defined on this administrative fee how it is not, in fact, “an amount that exceeds the percentage of their [the carriers] contribution to the USF”.

Thanks

Todd Singleton

The bureaucratic response.  Apparently a call is required to make “inquiries”:

To be more responsive to your comment, inquiry , or complaint, we direct your attention to the options below.  Not sure I’ll ever want an answer bad enough to call the FCC.

By following the steps below for comments, complaints, or inquiries, we will begin to act on your communication right away:

If you would like to file a COMMENT in a PROCEEDING, please visit our Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) at http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/hotdocket/list and follow the instructions on the page.

If you would like to file a COMPLAINT about a telecommunications related service, please visit our consumer complaint page at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us .  From this page, you will directed through a series of prompts to a specific complaint form, which you can fill out and submit to the FCC.  Submitting your complaint on one of our complaint forms insures that we have all the information we need to process your complaint, and will also shorten the time you will have to wait to receive a response from the company or entity you have a complaint about.

If you would prefer, you can also submit your complaint over the telephone, by calling our consumer call center at 1-888-CALL-FCC (1-888-225-5322) or 1-888-TELL-FCC (1-888-835-5322).

If you would like to make an INQUIRY into an FCC policy, or have general questions that the FCC might be able to answer, please call our consumer call center directly at 1-888-CALL-FCC (1-888-225-5322) or 1-888-TELL-FCC (1-888-835-5322).

Thank you for contacting the Federal Communications Commission.

Can you smell the fleecing?  It burns!