Kochi: BSNL has shocked a Kerala customer by asking him to pay dues pending since '30-12-1899'. For over a month, a very puzzled C.A. Francis had been getting repeated calls on his mobile asking him to pay up his outstanding dues or face action. But he didn’t take them seriously.
“Why should I? In fact I paid Rs 800 on October 19 and another Rs 200 on October 28 and even made an advance payment of Rs 19. The calls I received were from a call centre and they asked me to ignore them if I had paid my bill,” Francis said.
But to his horror, he got a notice asking him to clear outstanding dues 'since 30-12-1899', within three months failing which his phone would be permanently disconnected.
“First they pestered me with their calls and now the dues for over a century. The notice also claimed that my BSNL connection was temporarily disconnected when in fact it has been working till this moment,” he said.
When he contacted the BSNL office, the customer care officials went for an excuse in the one line in the notice ‘if you have already paid your bill by now, please ignore this’. “But then I never defaulted and my connection was never disconnected”, he said.
