waider

Vodafone seem to have decided that this would be a good time to prevent me from sending text messages to anyone - you know, now that I've got a bit of news to spread. Thanks, guys.

Over the weekend, my phone suddenly decided that it could no longer register on Vodafone's network. Thinking that this might be a continuation of the other hardware failures my phone has had, I figured I'd try the SIM in another phone. I tried two different phones, and both refused to even unlock the SIM, from which I concluded that the problem was with the SIM itself. I called Vodafone at about 9:30 this morning, and the customer service line rang out, which was on par with my expectations; I tried again later on, and this time got through to a customer service rep, who in a very short space of time confirmed that I could get a new SIM by going to my nearest Vodafone shop and telling them I needed one. He didn't have a useful explanation as to why the old SIM had died, but I wasn't expecting one anyway. And so I visited the local Vodafone store, and five minutes later I was connected to Vodafone's network once more. No charge, no hassle. Frankly, I'm quite stunned.

After a recent night of revelry I woke up to discover that my phone was apparently dead. Poking the power button elicited a brief lighting-up, but neither plugging it into the charger nor hooking it to a USB port caused any further activity.( The Saga Continues... )
So, in summary: I rock. FoneShop rocks. FoneMenders and Vodafone both suck.

Go to this page and enter anything you like into the login/password boxes, then click submit.
It won't go anywhere, because of this:

<form action="https://10.163.135.138/myv/services/login/Login.shtml"...

(again, my emphasis). Note that this is their business site.

An offer page on Vodafone's website currently reads, "Register you phone online and receive FREE call credit" (my emphasis)

This bill	compared with your last bill
Total usage: €0.00	^ up 100% - was €0.00

I guess 100% of nothing is, in fact, nothing, so it's probably correct in some sense.

(since I'd planned on hitting the sack about an hour ago...)

Vodafone got back to me. My whine, to recap, was that a note had appeared on my account indicating that it had more than one owner (i.e. that it is a business account) and for this reason I couldn't view some billing information. However, the message appears and disappears pretty much at random. The final response, in all its glory, from Vodafone:

Dear Mr Wade

The relevant department has concluded there investigation and they
have advised that the message you receive is a generic message; there
is no way to remove the message.

If you have any further queries, please call us on FreeFone 1907 and
we will be happy to assist you.

Yes, not only is the explanation utter rubbish, the guy managed to misspell my name. In fact, this was his second failed attempt at spelling it, having previously referred to me as "Mr Waidw". Ah, how I love telcos.

Update on my mystery multi-owner mobile phone account: I emailed care@. I got an autoreply telling me they'd endeavour to respond within 24 hours (this used be "we will reply within 24 hours"...), followed some 24 hours later by a request for security information to confirm that it was in fact my account (I am restraining myself from whining further about this). I emailed back, noting in passing that there appeared to be no tracking information beyond my email address - no ticket id, etc. I wonder how that looks on the customer support side? Anyway, today I got a message indicating that the issue had been escalated to the appropriate people. Tonight, looking at the website again, I'm getting the message on a more-or-less random basis. It's like somewhere there's a database with a split brain, and in one part I'm sole propietor of the phone, and in the other it's still somehow attached to the employer I transferred the phone from. Fills me with comfort, that does.

While debugging some site-scraping code, I noticed the following message on my mobile phone account:

Unfortunately, as there are several users on your account and your number is not registered to view all bills for this account we are unable to complete your request.

Now, aside from the fact that I wasn't attempting to change anything, the presence of multiple users on my account is rather news to me, since this particular phone is my personal phone and has been since about 2000 when it was transferred from my previous employer's account. Of course, this would explain why it is that I can't change my marketting preferences to stop the tossers from sending me SMS spam... I have contacted the care department once again. I have no doubt that incompetence and confusion will follow.

- laptop decided it didn't like the local power source (or something) and refused to either power up on mains or recharge itself. It's fine now, although I suspect the battery may be roached.
- phone and digicam ran out of power, the latter at an inopportune moment leaving me to take a bunch of photos on the former. The former only ran out of power when one of my travelling companions borrowed my "Irish plug to freakish foreign power socket" adapter overnight on the one night when I actually needed a recharge; fortunately, the phone spent an hour and a half beeping plaintively in lieu of actually shutting down and ran out of power right as I was boarding the flight home.
- Vodafone's picture album service appears to be broken again, meaning my cheapskate Flickr gateway isn't working right now.
- the phone's email client choked on one particular message, by which I mean the entire phone OS appeared to reboot. This was repeatable, too. I can't see anything wrong with the message now that I can look at it in a real client, so I can only assume shoddy coding in the client itself.

(This was an email exchange, rather than a phonecall; I'm paraphrasing and, in fact, inserting totally original dialogue rather than citing, though)

Vodafone Customer Care: Hi, Vodafone Customer Care, how can we help you?
Me: Hi, I seem to be having some trouble using your Picture Album service. I sent it some pictures from my mobile and they've not shown up on the site.
Vodafone Customer Care: Yes, we're having some trouble with that feature. It doesn't work right now.
Me: I see. And you haven't updated the site to reflect this.
VCC: Nope.
Me: And when do you think this will be fixed?
VCC: No idea.
Me: Uh, fine. Thanks.
VCC: Is there any other way in which we can make your day less pleasant?
Me: No, that'll be all.

To be fair, the Photo Album service is free, and as far as I know they're the only Irish mobile telco that provide such a free service (to clarify: I can send a photo via MMS from my cameraphone to a particular number and at some point thereafter it will show up in an area of Vodafone's website accessible only to me[1], which I subsequently hooked up to a script which grabs the photo and posts it to Flickr) but I'm sure there's something in the Sale Of Goods Act of 1981 which covers telling people they're getting a service when said service does not, in fact, work.

[1] And every Vodafone helpdesker ever, since every time I run into a problem they ask for my password. Apparently they don't get any sort of executive override.

Current Music: Rage Against The Machine: Testify

So the next response I got from the telco was that they'd logged in and it all looked fine. So I logged in, and sure enough it worked, and nothing was changed, right? Otherwise they'd have told me. Of course, it broke 30 seconds later, and refixed itself on a page refresh. Fabulous service. In the meantime, I can't seem to get photos from my phone to the photo album on the site via the SMS gateway, so I can't do my bounce-off-vodafone-into-flickr trick.

But enough about the telco! My bank has "improved" their online offering, by which I mean they've reskinned it and made some of the HTML less standards-compliant than it used be, and moved some columns around. My account numbers are still displayed with the first four digits hashed out, and the two credit cards I cancelled several years ago are still listed as "Balance Unavailable". One of the genuinely new things is that if I go to the Money Transfer page, it lists all the beneficiaries I've registered with BoI over the years (previously you just typed in the account number, now you select it from this list). The list for some reason includes my own accounts. Including the full account number, diligently obscured elsewhere on the page. Nice, guys.

Needless to say, this means that Finance::Bank::IE::BankOfIreland is temporarily out of commission.

I tried to log onto Vodafone's website to check how much recent phone activity is going to cost me. I got past the basic login, then clicked on "Billing", where it asks me to enter my SEEKRIT CUSTOMER SERVICE NUMBER (aka the last 4 digits of my account number). I got an error message, the same one as I got a few months back and which took at least a fortnight to get fixed. After 24 hours of it being broken, I figured I'd *shudder* contact the customer abuse department. I changed my password first, since I know from past experience that they'd ask for it, and I didn't want to give out the password I usually use for this sort of online thing. Then I emailed the problem description, and ended it with

Userid: [my userid]
Password: [my new password]
SEEKRIT CODE: [aforementioned account code]

Just now I got a response, quoting my original mail in its entirety, asking for my password.

GAH.

I got some SMS spam from Vodafone today. At the end of the spam it said "if you don't want to receive any more messages from Vodafone, call freephone 1800200234" (or words to that effect). So I called, and got on to a voicemail system which announced itself as Vodafone's marketting options voicemail. It informed me that it would walk me through my settings for contact from Vodafone marketting, and that it was important that I confirmed any changes before hanging up in order for them to take effect. So I listened patiently, and pressed "1" when it said "press 1 to continue", upon which it said, "you have opted out of all contact with Vodafone Marketting" and hung up on me. Which is fine; that's pretty much my preferred state of affairs. And, in fact, it's what this actual on-paper confirmation I have from Vodafone Customer Care says, since I previously asked to opt out of all this crap. So now I get to wait and see if they spam me again, at which point I will be having a polite word with the Data Protection Registrar about compliance.

Bob says that this sort of thing happens me because I pissed off the God of Telcos at some point, and I should really just give in to it.

Current Music: U2: Mysterious Ways (remixed by Massive Attack)

( in which waider waffles about his cellphone provider )

I swear, I must have a global flag on any customer service query I initiate with any company that says, "please do your utmost to not help this person". Admittedly I am biased in favour of using email for customer service as I hate dealing with phones, voicemail, hold music, etc. But you know, if your company offers customer service by email, you should maybe honour that offer, as opposed to ignoring the customers who use it.

Source of this whine:

Sony: I registered, or attempted to register, my NW-S23 ~~MP3~~ATRAC player on both the European and American "My Sony" sites. The European site doesn't recognise the model, because (I presume) it's American, and the American site doesn't recognise the model because, er, why doesn't it? My emailed query received an autoreply telling me that the issue would be dealt with in "two business days". About a week later I got a generic "thank you we'll pass that to our website people", which didn't answer anything in particular that I'd asked, and on Friday - three weeks after the initial query - I got a "not our problem" mail which - form letter that it is - makes absolutely no reference to the original query and in fact tells me that the part of Sony customer support I reached is only responsible for [list of stuff which covers my query] and I should go ask someone else. Choice.
My good friends at Vodafone are currently mishandling a new query, wherein I have asked if it's possible to block third-party SMS spam from premium-rate services. This, you will notice, is a yes/no question. I didn't phrase it as "if you can do this please do so", but that appears to be how it was interpreted, because after a week I got a message asking me to confirm my account details (over email! how secure!) which I replied to (oh well, can't hurt to tell everyone my seekrits, eh?) and that was a week ago. Vodafone claim to respond to emailed issues within 24 hours.

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.

May as well clear a few more items off the list of whines:

Vodafone

I can have either a paper bill or an electronic bill. If I choose the latter (I do) I get an email AND a text message telling me my new bill is online. I can't switch this off. I've asked, and they've not even understood the question. It's probably not in the three-ring binder.
The online bill is randomly available in Mozilla. As in, sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. I don't know what's at fault here; I got no help from customer care.
The bill summary is incomprehensible. Right now it's telling me I've got €55.07 worth of an outstanding balance, but that's not taking into account (as best I can tell) my chosen payment package which gets me up to €75.00 worth of calls per month.
Data time and call time aren't exchangable.
The site is an overblown mass of animations and deeply nested stupidity; finding useful information in it (such as "What are my GPRS settings?") is needlessly difficult, and for some reason despite the proliferation of personal-use WAP-based phones, the various pages about accessing WAP and using your phone for data access are all filed in the Business section of the site.

Bank of Ireland

The aforementioned broken site.
Frames, when the site is working.
The WAP version of the site is readonly: you can't transfer money or do any of the other useful things. What's the point in that?
The site that hosts information about my investment savings account also has difficulty with Mozilla; sometimes the login works, sometimes it throws me to a page that tells me the login failed, and sometimes it throws me to a page that says my session is in some way invalid.

The Weather

It's raining again.

*ring*
"Welcome to Vodafone customer support. <random advertising, something about picture messaging> If you have a query about <stuff I'm not interested in> ... press 3. If you have a query about Vodafone Live or MMS, press 4"
*press*
"If you are calling from your Vodafone Live handset, please hang up and call customer care from another handset or a landline."
*blink* *blink*
*shrug*
*hangup*

Current Music: Various Artists: Riverdance

Dealing with another telco, this one the shower who provide my cellphone service. At some point over the last $period, all my online bills, invoices and call logs were replaced with Folger's Crystals^W^Wblank pages. When I emailed customer care to enquire about this, they asked me to email my self-service access passwords (there are two) to them. Now, the second password is just the last four digits of my customer account number, which I refuse to believe they don't have access to, but seriously, kids. Send you my password by email? HELLO? La la la. So I changed the password to something else, then sent them that on the princple that it's not my SEEKRIT password and I can change it back when they fix the problem. I will skip over the fact that the three-ring binders I gave the password to cannot possibly have sufficient access to fix the problem if they don't have access to my password information or a system that allows them to pretend to be me, but I really can't be bothered having another protracted argument with a telco.
In dealing with the above, I notice that each of their emails ends with the following paragraph:
Can I also ask you when replying to this mail, to reply with history so we have all details below.
From past experience, I know that this means "please top-reply because we don't understand the whole "quoted text comes before reply" thing", and I note with the current exchange that they don't seem to adhere to their own advice.
On the end of one of the mails:
For information on self services options and Vodafone Products and Services , please go to www. vodafone.ie\my vodafone
With that exact formatting: a space after the first dot, and a backslash, and a space after the word "my". Which, needless to say, is not exactly a functional URL.
Finally, work-related: an image-installer, akin to Ghost. Except apparently it can't repartition a disk; it gives no indication when you should put in the "Main" disk; the "Main" disk is the last disk in the set, but it doesn't prompt you to swap things around and put in the first disk before it attempts to restore the image; and when it comes time to change the disk, it alerts you with... a media error. Yes, it tries to read off the end of the disk, and when you click "Retry", it suggests you insert the next disk. Outstanding.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Aisth: The Box

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waider

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Entries tagged with vodafone

and the obligitary snark

surprisingly positive customer experience

phone: fixed

more vodafone should-be-fired fodder

copy editors who should be fired

Math is HARD! (telco remix)

last post before bedtime

vodamoan

another day, another telco screwup

Switzerland: technology fails me

we don't care. we don't have to, we're the phone company.

it appears to be Companies Baiting Waider time

dumbass telco once again

minor friday vodafone gripe

vodafone: the competition also suck, why should we improve?

more fun from customer service

a compendium of customer abuse

while I'm complaining

customer support: a short dialogue

hammers, dumb as a sack of