Harry's Blog

It's been something of a stressful week. First there was the issue of whether the Anglican Church actually was actually compassionate and decent enough to pay Maternity Allowance¹.

Then our ISP Tiscali managed to lose Denmark. As the site I edit for my job resides on servers across the North Sea this was rather problematic. Technical support, which of course is nothing of the kind, wasn't very helpful, offering the usual "turn your pc on and off again." In the end I just went to bed with the hope that things would be working in the morning and I wouldn't lose my job. Thankfully Denmark had been rediscovered by Tiscali by then.

But as you can imagine I didn't fancy going through that kind of turmoil again. So I ordered business mobile broadband from Vodafone. It turned up yesterday and didn't work. The express card seemed fine but the sim card was clearly broken.

Thus began a Kafkaesque trial on the phone to Vodafone. To say this company had shitty customer services is an understatement of massive proportions. They were quite astonishingly poor. I was transferred around seven times.

One of this telephonic hops was to somewhere in India, where someone who couldn't actually speak English, but could read out scripts in English proved incapable of actually understanding the problem I was having let alone dealing with it. This was technical support.

Then there were two other hops who kept insisting that everything would be fine once my sim card was activated. This is despite me explaining again and again that the sim card was activated, the problem was that it was broken, and the express card plugged into my laptop couldn't recognise it.

By this time I was getting so fed up that rather than wanting to have the issue fixed I wanted to cancel the whole damn thing. So I was passed to a pathetic scouse git who spent twenty minutes saying "well if you want to disconnect we will, but let me offer you this" every minute or so for what seemed an age. After a while I took to re-enacting Jeremy Paxman's famous interrogation of Michael Howard and I just kept saying "disconnect me, disconnect me now."

Finally this had an effect and he said that although he worked in disconnections he couldn't disconnect me. It was at this point I considered homicide. But how could I tell one annoying scouser from the rest?² The git transferred me to the business department - but the automatic answering filter wanted to know my business phone number, but I didn't have a number, I had a broken mobile broadband system. Without the number it wouldn't let me through to speak to another human and thus after over an hour of being on hold and trying to teach English as a foreign language I was thwarted and had to hang up.

I phone back. I reached regular customer services and a helpful, if not confident English speaking, man who assured me that not only would I be safely transferred to business, but I wouldn't have to tap in a number I didn't have. And this finally I reached Nicki. Nicki was everything a call centre operator should be. She was smart, helpful and polite and she was even a native speaker of the language - the heavens be praised.

Nicki sorted everything out, booked a collection for the faulty gear and cancelled the account for me. She even phoned back an hour later to make sure I'd received an email I needed to print out for the return.

Seriously Vodafone, you are one of the shittiest companies it has ever been my displeasure to work with. Half of your phone staff are stupid and ignorant, the other half can barely speak English. Not only that some of your staff are deliberately rude and unhelpful, the example being the scouse tosspot at disconnections. My advice for you is to promote Nicki from the business section and put her in charge of your customer facing operations.

But for now I'm not only pissed off with your efforts to solve my mobile broadband problem yesterday - losing me nearly a full day of work³ I'm seriously thinking of ditching you as the supplier of my regular mobile phone.

Anyway we hope that the stressful events of the week are over. But now the local busybodies are apparently up in arms about my wife daring to have a baby⁴ who knows what the weekend has in store for us.

Update: Well did Vodafone come on pick up its broken stuff today? Take a wild guess.

_{¹The answer is currently back to "yes" but there's plenty of time for that to change. Where the church is concerned "piss-ups" and "breweries" come to mind.
²Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
³Ironically ordering mobile broadband was to stop this kind of thing happening.
⁴The selfish cow.}