Personal responsibility

Although I’m no fan of Rogers, I have to admit I’m on their side (mostly) on this one.

A Toronto woman says the billing practices of Rogers Wireless Inc. led to her husband discovering her extramarital affair.

Now the woman, whose husband walked out, is suing the communications giant for $600,000 for alleged invasion of privacy and breach of contract, the results of which she says have ruined her life.

Supposedly this woman’s extramarital affair was exposed when her husband saw some suspicious calls from her cell phone statement which Rogers had bundled in with the regular family bill. The husband then phoned the number and spoke with the person there who confirmed the affair.

I may be a minority of one, but I don’t make it a habit of calling the numbers on my wife’s cell phone records to see who she's been talking with, and why. So I imagine there was already cause for suspicion and this was but one more indicator. That still doesn’t excuse his behaviour, but it does suggest the marriage was already in trouble and a divorce was inevitable.

But more importantly, she was cheating and got caught. I make no moral judgement on her behaviour, but it does seem typical that these days, when one is caught with one’s hand in the proverbial cookie jar the first response is to blame the manufacturer for making the lid too easy to remove. That decision was hers and hers alone, and to try to lay the blame elsewhere just doesn’t fly.

As for Rogers’ behaviour, if the report is correct in that they “unilaterally terminated its cellular contract with the plaintiff that had been in her maiden name and included it in the husband’s account that was under his surname.” then they are, at the very least, in breach of any number of privacy rules and regulations. Other aspects of the claim against Rogers raise even more troubling concerns about their privacy processes which must be corrected if true, and so they have work to do.

But the bottom line, Gabriella Nagy, is that you made a decision that had unexpected consequences. It sucks, but that’s what accepting personal responsibility is all about. And laying a $600,000 lawsuit on Rogers just means you’re trying to make someone else pay for your own errors in judgement. I hope the courts see it the same way.