Front Page · Billing Desk
Man's Death Ruled Insufficient Grounds For Cancellation
The gym offered a discount to stay. He'd already been cremated.
The bank statement still shows it, the same line every month: £34.99, months after the funeral. The direct debit had not noticed a thing.
We'd hate to see him go.
Beside it sat a stack of gym mail, unopened, addressed to a dead man. He had died on the gym floor, mid-set, with the bar still loaded. He lay there for a while before anyone checked he was breathing. Two regulars stepped past him to reach the squat rack. He had also lost control of his bowels onto the bench padding. The equipment log later called this general wear.
Someone in the family rang the gym months later. That was the same week they cancelled the phone plan and lost the streaming password.
The call went to hold music first. Then came a recorded list of reasons for leaving: too expensive, moved away, no longer motivated. There was no box for dead.
A retention specialist came on the line instead of a cancellation form. "We'd hate to see him go," she said. She offered a discount to stay, a longer discount after that, and finally a pause on the account.
To cancel for good, the gym needed proof. A death certificate had to be faxed to a billing department that still had a fax number. It arrived on a Tuesday and was filed the following Wednesday, because Wednesdays were fax days.
The card kept being charged while the fax sat under review. Three more payments went through, each one logged as "membership, active."
A refund was eventually issued, minus an administration fee for processing the refund. The gym called this "goodwill." Nobody explained whose.
The final case note listed the reason for cancellation as "no longer motivated." Nobody at the gym flagged it. In fairness, it was accurate.
This newspaper checked its own accounts before going to print. A columnist who wrote our obituaries for years is still billed for cloud storage he can no longer use. Nobody here has faxed anything either.