A limerick a week #228

Your call is important to us…

This is a bit of a Victor Meldrew rant, so please scroll to the bottom if you just want the limerick!

I spent three hours yesterday morning dealing with what younger generations refer to as life admin; bureaucratic chores to you and me.

First up, British Telecom had earlier advised me that my broadband contract was due for renewal and that I could ‘upgrade’ to the same deal that I was on, but for £20 a month less than I was currently paying. So I did.

Consequently, yesterday’s first chore was to contact them to ask why had I subsequently received a letter demanding the return of their hardware, a Smart Hub 2, as it was still needed to fulfil the new contract. It took an hour to wait for a call centre agent to become available and to resolve the issue through an online chat, but eventually they acknowledged it was their mistake and at least I was dealing with a person and not a chatbot. Sadly, I can’t charge them for my time spent wasted correcting their mistake.

Next was a call to Three Mobile. Two years ago I’d got an add-on to a phone upgrade in the form of a Samsung tablet with a SIM and 2Gb of data per month. The full-term cost was significantly less than the outright cost of the tablet alone (cf John Lewis’ price) and it would come in handy, so why not?

Well, the contract is now up and I don’t wish to keep paying for data, so a quick call to Three was in order.

Did I say ‘quick’? After being on hold for an hour I finally got to speak to a call centre worker. It took two minutes to explain that I wanted to terminate the contract and that I wasn’t interested in any inducements to remain.

Did that help? Nope! The guy at the other end had a script to go through and go through it he would. I said “no” to each inducement and reiterated every time that I just wanted to terminate the contract.

Seemingly, no divergence from the script was allowed and, no matter how many times I said “please, just terminate the contract”, the call centre worker kept ‘discovering’ new offers to tempt me to stay on as a customer. It took the best part of an hour before he ran out of inducements so, including being on hold, it took nearly two hours on the phone simply to terminate a contract that had reached its minimum term. Had I wanted to renew it instead, it would have taken one click of a mouse! Grrrr!

Here’s the limerick:

A call centre agent once said
That he was the person you’d dread
To answer your call
Because, above all,
He just wanted to mess with your head!