 as I signed up for a Microsoft 365 subscription for a month's free trial, used my personal email address, which was at outlook.com account. It all went through. When I went back into my email a couple of days after to cancel the subscription, as it wasn't needed, my billing and subscription section said here, there was nothing there. Since October of 2022, I've received countless emails to pay the invoice. When I tried to access this account to take me to the payment page, it tells me I can't use my personal email, but that's the same email used to sign up for it initially. Thought it was a hoax email at first, but I do remember signing up for it with the amount information. Can't get through to Microsoft Customer Service, directs you to online support, but it's useless. I don't want to be racking up a massive bill if it is legit. So I wrote kind of a mini book there on this one. I know, yeah. I know, Sherry, you put in there, call MS support. The thing about it is that anything that has the word free in front of it, Microsoft is not going to be put at probably lower than the lowest Q available that they could ever find. You'll be put in a pile that we'll get around to in a year or so. But the thing about this is there are more questions, because we don't know the whole context. There is no such thing as a free trial for an individual. So I don't understand what they actually signed up for, because 365 is free for individuals. So you can get a free 365 account, you don't have any features. I mean, you have just the basics, but there's no one month trial for individuals. Now, there is a one month trial for family accounts, but there's nothing for an individual. So I don't understand that, but you're going to have to get support involved either way, because when you sign up, no matter what subscription you're going for, when you sign up, it's actually creating an Azure Active Directory instance. So it goes out there and when you're only in a free trial, it still creates that instance. That's the back end of 365. So when it does that, it gives you what's called a control account. So there's an automatic control account, you have to give it a name. You have to, during the sign up process, you have to call it something, and it is your name at, and then a name you pick at.onmicrosoft.com. And that control account is like a backdoor or a last-ditch effort to get into your subscription in case none of your other accounts work. So you should have gotten some emails from Microsoft right after you signed up. I mean, literally, it should have sent you an email saying, this is your login ID that you used or this is your subscription ID, this is your account ID, something that tells you that you actually got the subscription. And you need to find that email, okay, because that's going to gather the information that you need to pass on to support. There's no, I don't see any way you're going to solve this without getting MS support involved. And if that's, you know, you have to email them and get put into a queue, that's what's going to happen. But I can tell you that I had an incident happen with a family member about the, the same thing happened with a family, well, not the same thing, but with a family member, where they signed up for a 365 account, they canceled it a month later and they kept on getting emails saying they had to pay a bill. Well, eventually, you know, I looked into it and I could get into the account and was able to get in and look at it. And it actually showed a zero balance. But the account still existed. So Microsoft just automatically sends out emails saying you owe money when you actually don't owe money. So, I know. So, number one, I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as you can find the evidence that you actually signed up and you've got those emails and that you've actually, you know, haven't done anything because if you didn't enter, enter any credit card information, then there's no way they can bill you. There's no way that they can actually, you know, do that. And if they have, if you did sign up with credit card information or refuting that, then you've got credit history to fight back to push back against. And you've paid money and therefore they should respond faster than a free. They should. You have to find that information, though. You have to, you have to, somehow they sent you something that said they always do. And you need to find that info and then pass it on in the support because otherwise you're going to be waiting forever. Literally, you'll be waiting forever to get this result. I don't know about everybody else that like I don't waste my time calling in to Microsoft support, even as MVPs getting premium support and all that. It's just it's a nightmare. However, through email and for other issues where I'm that are rarer issues, I'll actually go in and search and find where people have had similar issues and I'll file it. I'll post it online in those discussions. And I usually get people responding within an hour or so. I guess it's amazing how they do watch a bunch of channels. I mean, I've had I've had experience with the email support where I literally do an email. I had a problem with one of my my family accounts. So I sent in an email. It took them three days to get back to me. But when they actually got the ticket after those three days, it took like an hour to fix the problem. But it took them three days to get back to me. Yeah, OK, so I get it. I'm not at a very high Q. I understand it's not an urgent issue. There's no way to escalate an issue. You know, there's they don't they don't allow you to do that. But you can also fill out the online form so you can email Microsoft support, but you can also fill out this, you know this online form that asks you for more information. And I think that's part of the issue is a lot of people don't provide a lot of information when they do support tickets. It's indicative of a help desk, right? You know, they they help desk goes by a script and that's exactly what Microsoft Help Desk does. Believe it or not, every time you do support, they're going by a script. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they have to. And they're looking for more information. They're looking for screenshots. They're looking for, you know, error codes, you know, error messages. They're look. If you supply him with that, I guarantee you that you're gonna your your case is gonna move. Yep, much faster than one that has nothing in it. Version number browser, bring the browser, whatever the version of the browser that you're on. Yeah, 10 and ID, 10 and ID, what all those things, whatever that you have, whatever information, all of that's going to help expedite. Yeah, I think also I've had to deal with this for friends and family too. And I think if you go to the partner page, you can also reach out to a partner. Sometimes a partner can get through and in at least a faster way or give you great advice like Mike did, right? So it's not even just so much about, you know, being able to do it, but sometimes they can help you at least navigate a little bit of the crazy. So Mike, you're gonna post your address and phone number here. I already did, I tweeted it out. Sweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mike Nelson, gun for hire. See, he'll get you out of a Microsoft jail. He's gonna help you with all your family. Exactly where you need to go. Oh, what's that? Phone number. I said, but also it might be nice to post where exactly you need to go to get to the right customer support area to fix what it is you need to fix it. Oh. There is an awful lot. There's just lots of support and lots of it doesn't work. Well, there's no way to go to write that email or fill out that form. Yeah, there's no dispute. There's no absolutely no dispute that the way that Microsoft support is implemented in terms of what the general public sees, the first time user sees, it's confusing as hell to me. I mean, it really is. They don't know who to call. They don't know what to do. They don't know who to email. They don't know what form to fill out. They don't know how, you know, I understand it's, you know, they need to dumb it down. It's a mess. It is. And they need to dumb it down too because they're asking for a lot of information that some folks just don't know what they're asking for here, especially when you're dealing with directly with end users. Cause remember companies were used to dealing with like IT groups. They're used to dealing with partners, but now they're dealing with individual, you know, individual folks that just have an M365 account, you know, and they need to work, walk, walk through that at a, at a, at a pace that's indicative of the person that's on the other end, you know, and nobody wants to get calls from support anymore because everybody's afraid it's a, you know, it's going to be a phishing scam or a ransomware thing. So they're not going to answer the phone. And when they say, oh, I'm from Microsoft support, your computer has viruses. That's why you can't get to your M365 account. So you need to give me your PayPal ID and, you know, deposit this amount and, you know, all that other kind of fun stuff. You know, there's all kinds of things, but Microsoft needs to do a better job at this. No doubt. No doubt. But some folks, you got to step up and take, you got to take some responsibility. You got to be able to, you know, be able to provide the information in order to get it fixed. It's just fighting the right place to provide that information too. Yeah. One of the worst things that I see out there from, from my trips through the new, from news land is, is if you have a problem with an outlook.com hotmail, whatever account. And they say, and they, and you get, you get flagged, getting yourself unflagged is sometimes completely next to impossible because there's no such thing as a person. All there is, is a form that goes to an automated system that always wants information that you don't have. Or wants more information than you do have. Granted, a lot of the stuff I see is people who have a counselor, hey, I had this camp two years ago. I ain't never been in it for the last and I wanna get, and it won't do it. Well, that's because it's gone. It's just, it's not there anymore. You really shouldn't. I'm calling what it is. Yeah, it's gone. And there's no way to get that back. It's just never gonna happen. You need it, if you're going to open it. And that's, that's a lot. People, people will do that for their, their Xbox accounts and game passes and things like that. Hey, I set up my Xbox through this and I don't even know where it is anymore. I don't remember the password. Yeah. Don't even get me started on the whole, what account either? Are you saying little kids setting up game accounts that turn into Microsoft accounts could potentially be a bad idea? What? That turn into work and school accounts that have the same, you know, have the same name as a work and school account. Right there, Mike. One of them removes one of your accounts from an Xbox and what that does is not remove the account. It kills the account. You gotta be real careful with Xbox. Then I have my, my family member that sets up a Gmail account and goes through G apps and gives it its own domain name, you know, fredsbicycles.com, you know, and then they go into Microsoft and they say, you know what, I want to create a new account called fredbicycles.com. So now they have two accounts, two separate accounts, one in G apps and one in Microsoft. And they have no idea which one to use because both of them are, you know, maybe, yeah, one's gotta require, one requires a 12 character password, one you can just put a period and that's good enough for a password and whatever. It's just crazy. Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have changed the subject, I guess. But the thing of it is trying to find the right support, find to find the right support avenue for your problem. It's a lot easier if you're a big company, if you're a small company or a person, it can be such a nice mirror. And I really do wish they would straighten that out and give you some way of getting to the right place without spending two days searching through phone numbers and calling the wrong people all the time. Well, they can bug Christian who can, you know, he's an RG. I am happy to help, so just send me, I need your social security number and credit card information and then I'm happy to help. He'll just fix you right up. Yeah. He can post it to the distribution list, the MVP distribution list, like I see all the time, like this case needs to be escalated. I'm like, oh, come on, really? Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we used to call that a punt. Yeah. Well, the ironic thing is you said that, you know, post in a forum and you'll get answers more, you know, quickly, that's what they did. That's where we got the question from. Yeah. Yeah. They're trying. They're trying to hand somebody to help them. Good effort. Good effort there, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.