I just have to share this with you ....
Today I had occasion to query the bill for my mobile phone.
For background, I should perhaps explain that I have recently entered a contract with a telco - a very large telco - in fact, it would not be stretching the truth to refer to this organisation as a very, very large telco. Everybody with me so far?
The new contract with said very, very large telco is a cap contract. The way this is supposed to work, as most of you will know, is that my monthly bill is capped at a certain amount. If I use less than this value of calls, I pay for what I use. If I use more than this amount, I only pay for the amount of the cap.
My first bill arrived yesterday. It was for an amount significantly greater than the cap - like nearly four times as much! :eek:
I tried to sort this out over the phone when the bill arrived. That didn't work. The bloke I spoke to seemed to find it all slightly amusing but he was not very helpful (read: he was a patronising git and if we had been in the same room, I would have cheerfully snotted him! :mad: ).
Today I visited the shopfront operation where I had made the original contractual arrangement. I spoke to the bloke with whom I had done the deal. I showed him my bill and asked him if he could explain it to me. He tried. He failed. I smiled at him politely and told him that I didn't understand any of what he had just said. I knew what all the words meant but, when they were placed in the sequence he had just constructed, I could not draw from them any useful interpretation. He tried again. This time he drew a little illustration on a piece of paper. He failed again.
We agreed that it might be more helpful if I were to talk to the billing department, using his phone.
The young lady in the billing department was actually very helpful. Unlike her colleague from yesterday, she didn't seem slightly amused. Very quickly we worked out that the contract that I had been given was unsuitable and a different contract would be much more to my liking. She offered to switch me to the new contract immediately, adjust my current amount outstanding back to the level of the original cap and, in short, solve my problems. I was very pleased with this and still am.
Naturally there will be some paperwork associated with all this. She promised to send it to me. I started to give her my email address. She explained to me that this was not necessary because she can't send the paperwork by email - it will have to be sent by Australia Post.
There was a pause in our conversation. I said:
"Does anything about this strike you as ironic?"
She said: "What do you mean?"
I said: "Your employer is, I think, if not the biggest then certainly one of the biggest Internet Service Providers in the country and you can't send me some documentation by email. Isn't that a bit odd?"
"Yes," she said. "You're right but there's nothing I can do about it. Our policy is to send all these documents by normal mail."
She's a bright, pleasant and helpful person and she solved a problem for me so I am grateful to her. However, she is working for an organisation that has its head jammed firmly up its bum!
I hope you all enjoyed that - it made my day! :D
