Man Charged $27,000 to Watch Bears

By Benjy Lipsman in News on Feb 26, 2009 5:45PM

Chicagoist loves the Bears and we've had to make extra efforts occasionally in order to catch them on TV when away from home. We've endured cheesy hotel sports bars that had satellite. We've watched the game on static-filled screens with Spanish announcers. And we've DVRed games and then had to make tremendous efforts to not see the score before we watched the game. But we've never had to pay to watch a game -- other than maybe some overpriced hot wings. Wayne Burdick, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky.

In November, while awaiting the departure of a cruise in Miami, Burdick fired up his laptop with its AT&T wireless card and accessed the game via his Slingbox at home. Since he was still in port, he wasn't concerned about the charges for downloading the game. So imagine his shock when the bill arrived for $27,788.93. That's more expensive than a season ticket to the best seat at Soldier Field.

It seemed that AT&T had mistakenly charged his account the two cents per kilobyte international data rate, even though he was still on U.S. soil -- or docked next to it at least. Initial pleas to AT&T got the charged knocked down to about $6000, which was still absurd, considering he could prove he was technically in Miami at the time. Only when Burdick contacted Team Fixer at the Sun-Times was he able to finally resolve the matter. Even if he didn't ultimately end up having to pay any sort of four or five figure surcharge to watch his Bears, we still think Burdick deserves some sort of induction in the Super Fans Hall of Fame for his ordeal.