a compendium of customer abuse

[waider]

Since I haven't ranted about it near enough lately:

• My mobile phone provider has been dealing with a query related to my camera phone since mid-November. By "dealing with" I mean "mostly ignoring". The last proactive comment I got from them was that my query had been passed to technical support. Today they asked me a question which would pretty much prevent this passing off from having happened.
• My new credit card arrived. After spending ten minutes on hold trying to get someone to activate it, I gave up and tried again today. The guy who handled the call today tried twice to offer me one of the pre-scripted services. When I went to add the card to my online registered cards, the site said they didn't have enough information on me and could I maybe call customer support?
• I phoned the sorting office for office mail on Friday to find out what they'd done with our two missing issues of Linux Magazine and subsequent resend of same. The guy told me he'd talk to the postman for the area and get back to me before lunch. He called today after lunch to tell me that the postman only recently found out we were in the office ([a] we've been there since the company's inception in 1999, [b] other stuff gets delivered there on a regular basis, [c] the address clearly states "Alphyra House, Heather Road" which uniquely identifies the building, regardless of the fact that our company name does not appear on the outside of the premises), that he had no idea what became of the magazines, and that he couldn't confirm that they were returned to the sender address since he handles so many return-to-sender items on a weekly basis.

I think that should keep my customer service irritation level high for the next month or so.

Comments

[candice.livejournal.com]

You forgot to rant about a bandwidth provider there.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Okay, just for you:

• I tried to register on my ISP's website and got some sort of an error in the middle of the registration process (database insert issue, I think). Thereafter it appeared that my chosen username was in a half-registered state where the login page insisted I didn't exist, but the registration page insisted the username was already in use. So I emailed them to ask if this could be, you know, fixed, and got no reply. I just tried it last night on spec and managed to log in no problem, only to find a message informing me that the system was down for maintenance, call back later.

An Post

[(Anonymous)]

And when they return magazines to a friend marked "insufficient address" (the postal package, not the friend) and the friend has to fork out (or get his employer to fork out) to resend it, An Post makes more money. (Or is that: they lose more money"?)

Re: An Post

[waider.livejournal.com]

It would be amusing if they marked the sender 'insufficient address'. And about as practical as their current modus operandi.