By xaosseed
I got my shiny Vaio. Its beautiful, all the tech works. The ‘non-hardware’ part of the web-n-walk chip from T-mobile is shockingly bad. Its like ‘MRE - three lies for the price of one’ - except in phonebill form.
First - the bill itself - where it turns out that by ‘first month free’ they in fact mean ‘we usually charge a month on top of the first month, so we’re only charging you for the first month’. Ah huh. Not impressed but fine, I was prepared to suck that one up.
Second - the text messages; they charged me for a bunch of text messages off a chip thats embedded in a computer. WiFi, phonecalls, anything like that sure - but I sure as goldurnt didn’t sms anyone off that chip. Fail.
Third - the name; they got my name wrong. Not a little ‘misspelling’ wrong, but in fact the name of the previous owner of my flat. Not me, nothing to do with me.
So I ring up as soon as I twig this - welcome letter - I get told ‘oh, nuisance, will take a while to sort out’. Fine, think I, whatever, I’m in no hurry.
First bill arrives as described and I ring up, wait for ages and get told that I have to send them my birth cert to change the name. Bullshit say I, cancel it and get hung up on, ring back and get told ‘oh, theres a £300 cancellation fee, but its not in your name so you won’t get chased for it.’
This struck me as a pretty shitty thing to do to the guy so after a bit more argument they tell me ‘write in’. Fuck sake. They have the notes on the account, they know whats happened and still they persist in making me run around to fix their screw up.
So they’re essentially threatening to bill some guy who did nothing a pile of money because their salesperson screwed up, unless I jump through hoops.
I’m going to go scream at the guys in the shop here in town, see if they can fix it since I can show them my passport, bills, proofs etc. and worst comes to worst, bring a pliers and snap the chip in front of them.
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29th of May, 2008
A birth cert seems a bit draconian — surely any “official” ID (a passport is pretty darn official, and usually requires a birth cert to obtain) will do.
That said, my experience with mobile phone companies over here (including T-Mobile) has been appalling. It’s difficult to envision a more dysfunctional industry (with the possible exception of credit reporting agencies), where individual employees available to assist customers are nearly always either powerless or stupid and customers are expected to bend over and take whatever contractual reaming the companies have collectively come up with.
29th of May, 2008
Meh… all the telcos have supremely awful customer service..
I’m not surprised.
More about the Vaio please.
30th of May, 2008
May I recommend a very strongly worded rant letter of complaint? It didn’t work for BT when we had problems setting up our internet in Dublin but it got the Smart guys to bend over backward when we had to do the same thing with them. Visbily c.c’ing the letter to their regulatory watchdog might also encourage them to respond more favourably. I am under the impression that the UK regulatory bodies are actually effective in handling complaints. But then, I’ve never had to test the system