Phone Companies Are Shit

That you didn’t read this earlier in the week is attributable to the fact that my DSL service is provided by a company which is to customer service what dog excrement is to nutrition. In fact the service had crapped out the day before we called in the problem, but it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between the usual patchy and shite service and a complete failure, so we didn’t contact them until Sunday.

It goes without saying that when you call the customer service number the last thing you’re going to receive is customer service. In fact what you get is an automated response and an interminably long list of voice prompts, to which you have to repeatedly respond “Yes” or “No”. Sometimes the system misunderstands you and goes off at a complete tangent. "I think you requested a dead badger. If this is correct, please say yes." You didn't request a dead badger so you try saying no, then the voice responds "Sorry, I didn't understand your response. Do you want a dead badger?" So you end up shouting "Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck you! Fucking fucks! Fuck, shit, fuck, bollocks!" and putting the phone down.

You persevere and eventually get a person on the line. Guess where they’re from? That’s right, India. At this point you have to go through a hundred questions designed to rule out all the things that could be your fault. You want to short-cut this by saying “Look, fuckwit, the service worked Friday and didn’t work Saturday. I didn’t change anything so it must be you fuckers. Why don’t you stop wasting my time and figure out how you fucked up my service?” Unfortunately this isn’t in the call center script, so you have to go through the motions.

Once they’ve realized that there’s a fault on the line (no rocket science here – the phone line sounds like its connected through that dead badger) they put a message into some other useless dickweed who has to call you back. When they call, they inform you that no-one can come out today (it’s Sunday) so they make an appointment for tomorrow. At this point I irritated Mrs,. Bison, who had been dealing with them, by pointing out that we pay the bastards for seven days of service a week, so they could get their fat lazy arses out here today and fix it, thank you very much. (Of course they tell you they can’t come out today – it saves on overtime; they’ll only do it if you complain!) Unfortunately she’d already put the phone down. No problem, right? Just call them back. After all, the number shows up in the call log. But when you call it you get a “not available” message. Surprise, surprise – the wankers won’t let you call them, even though they’re a fucking phone company. If you want to get in touch with them again you have to plough back through all the voice prompts and the bloke in India. And the dead badger.

I thought I’d leave a blunt message via their website (on a different computer – no service, remember?) but behind the innocuously titled “Contact Us” is not a simple form to allow you to contact them. Oh no! You get another five hundred fucking boxes to fill in, with everything from your address and phone number to inside leg measurement and shoe size. I just wanted to let them know what useless tossers they are, but they don’t make it very easy to tell them, I suspect because they already know.

Phone companies are all shit. If they ever mess up the charges on your account (what am I talking about? It’s not “if” it’s “when”) you can spend a month trying to explain the problem, to someone that they obviously hired specifically because of their perfect combination of stupidity and laziness. Even if you can get them to understand the screw-up, and even if they say they’ll fix it, they won’t; when you look at your next bill you’ll either find no change, or that they fucked it up twice just to piss you off.

Mobile phone companies are especially shit. When you get a plan that comes with a phone and the phone doesn’t work, you’d think that you’d go back to the store and tell the spotty retard behind the counter “this phone doesn’t work” and he’d give you another. Fine so far, but then you see a charge on your next bill for the privilege of using the store to return their broken phone. Now you have to practically go to the CEO to get the charge removed. And again, they say they’ll remove it but then don’t. I suspect this is standard practice at phone companies – don’t actually issue the credit as 80% of people won’t check, so that way the phone company can keep the money.

I find it especially galling that my limited enjoyment of crap television is perpetually interrupted by commercials for mobile phone companies touting their amazing service and telling you how wonderful life would be with them. If they were forced to use truth in advertising the resulting pitch would look much more like:

Switch to us. We’ll treat you like meaningless shit because we don’t care. Our service will suck but there’s not much you can do about it. Once you’ve signed the contract we have you by the balls – don’t even think about complaining. Behind the smiley face commercials, we all hate you, so why don’t you just go fuck a dead badger?

I hope that one day you’ll be able to read this, which means I’ll finally have been able to post it…



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison