I was fortunate enough to grow up in a low-tech world.
Although I was in my late teens when I used a computer for
the first time, computers didn’t become a significant part of my life until a
decade later, and I was well into my thirties before I became an internet user.
Signing a contract with a service provider changed my life.
But was it a change for the better? At the time I thought so, but twenty years
later I’m starting to have my doubts.
But this isn’t a rant about technology. Computers are a part
of everyday reality for all but the poorest of the poor and there’s no going
back.
My issue is that I’ve always had an aversion to change and
that can be a really bad thing.
Twenty years later I still have a contract with the same
service provider. In truth, if you’d asked me how I felt about that fact two
months ago, I’d have thought it was a good thing. Surely twenty years of
customer loyalty made me a valued customer. Surely if something went wrong, my
service provider would do their best to fix it.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Until two months ago I was still using an ADSL internet
connection. It was a little unstable at times, but I could live with that. From
time to time I considered replacing my modem because I felt a newer one would
make my life easier, but somehow there were always more important things to
take care of.
Then disaster
struck. Aging copper cables became so
corroded that we were forced to migrate our landline to LTE, and with that
change ADSL was no longer available. I was forced to embrace more modern
technology.
To start with it was a frustrating business as the migration
took twenty-eight days – a period during which our telephone was so
dysfunctional that phone calls were limited to the absolute essential, and when
we were forced to make a call, communication was extremely difficult.
The fact that my new internet router didn’t work became a
nightmare from which I’m unable to escape.
My service provider doesn’t have shops, so everything has to
be done either online or by phone. If you report something online, you may get
a generic response a day or two later. Over the phone you’re likely to be put
on hold for ten to twenty minutes before you can speak to anybody, but often
you’ll then find you’ve been put through to the wrong department and have to
hold again while they put you through to the right one.
I’m not a big cell phone user. I don’t have a contract but
always have a little prepaid airtime for emergencies. On one occasion, several
years ago, I phoned my service provider from my cell phone, held for a long
time while a very obliging man at the help desk investigated the issue, then,
just as he returned with an answer to my problem, my airtime ran out. Of course
when I phoned back I was unable to speak to the same guy and had to start all
over again.
Because of that one experience, I’ve always made important
calls over the landline. So when my
router didn’t work, I did the same.
I was told a courier would collect the faulty router and I’d
receive a new one. Somewhere between the difficulty of communicating on a crackly
phone and the fact that there was a week’s delay before the courier arrived (without
warning), I missed the fact that the replacement would only arrive a day after
the old one was collected. The situation was complicated by the fact that the
courier’s note said he was collecting the router for repair rather than
replacement. I wasn’t prepared to hand it over without speaking to my service
provider first, so I sent him away, then struggled to call for confirmation. I
was told I should have given it to him, and that they’d send him back to fetch
it.
Days later, after many complaints both over the phone and
online, the router still hadn’t been collected. When our new phone was finally
activated, allowing me to have the first proper conversation in over a month,
someone at my service provider’s call centre delivered the bad news – my order
had been cancelled and I would have to start over. How did that happen when I’d notified them
within an hour of the courier’s visit?
Numerous further complaints led to my case being
“escalated”, and two weeks after his first visit the courier finally returned to
fetch the router.
I struggled with the courier too. Initially he tried to
leave without giving me any proof that he’d collected anything, then finally he
gave me a barely legible “sender’s copy” of an undated form which gave no
detail of the contents of the package he’d collected, only that the “total
pieces” was one. It said I was the sender, but didn’t give any details of the
receiver.
I’ve always suspected that the router was lost, now on close
inspection of that form, I’m starting to understand why that probably is the
case.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As soon as the courier had left with my router, I phoned my
service provider again. The person I spoke to asked how I knew he really was
the courier. This had been my fear the first time, but I couldn’t risk sending
him away twice, so I’d been forced to trust him. Clearly that was a mistake
because things went downhill rapidly after the router was collected.
Twenty-four hours later the replacement hadn’t arrived. I had important plans for the following day
but I needed to put this whole nasty business behind me so I felt it was best
to postpone my plans until the router arrived. But more than two weeks later,
the router still hasn’t arrived and nobody seems able to tell me where it is.
Initially I contacted my service provider every day, my
annoyance growing by the day. After several days during which I did my best to
be patient, I told them I had signed up for a new email address in case I was
forced to cancel my contract. Surely that would set off alarm bells. But no, it
made no difference. I made it clear that, after twenty years of customer
loyalty, I really didn’t want to leave them, so perhaps they believed I would
put up with their abuse indefinitely.
When I discovered that I could use their sim card in our new
landline look-alike, the fact that I started using the data I’d paid for
probably led them to believe that I had no intention of leaving.
Finally last week I was forced to sign a contract with a
service provider who has shops, allowing me to deal with a real person
face-to-face. What a pleasant experience that was!
Unfortunately for now I’m sitting with two contracts. I’ve
told my old provider that I want to cancel my contract, but that I need some
assurances first:
1.
I will be able to keep my email accounts open
until I’ve been able to inform all my contacts of the change of address. That’s
no easy business when I have twenty years of contacts including several
belonging to my late father. Some of those relate to his estate, so I can’t
afford to lose them, yet finding their contact details is going to take me some
time.
2.
I won’t be charged for a router I don’t have.
Paying for a “free” router is one of the terms normally associated with an
early cancellation. But I can’t be expected to pay for something I don’t have.
It was only after I’d signed my new contract that somebody from
my old service provider finally bothered to phone me. Despite that fact that
all my complaints are well documented, the first thing she asked me was what my
problem was. I told her she already had all the facts. How could I be expected
to start explaining all over again?
She had no issue with my cancelling my contract – as long as
I pay a cancellation fee. But how can I be expected to pay for their
incompetence? I made it clear many times that I was reluctant to cancel my
contract but in the end they left me with no choice.
At time of writing I’m still waiting for a final word on
this. My health has suffered from all the strain it’s caused, and a large part
of my life has been put on hold as I try to get this mess sorted out. And even
if they give me the assurances I need, it’s still going to take several weeks
before I’m confident that closing my old email accounts won’t do any long term
damage.
