Saturday, July 14, 2007

3rd party on the line

I am feeling thoroughly exasperated and ratty! and it's all the fault of mobile phones, specifically Orange!
Some years ago, one of my daughters sold me her old mobile when she upgraded. We left it in her name for some reason* and this hasn't been much of a problem since. It's on 'pay as you go' and I only use it for phone calls so really the only problem is, I don't get very good signal, if any, at home. Being brung up in a generation that used landlines for calls anyway this isn't really much of a problem either except that these days we have a cordless phone, so in a power cut, I don't have any phone at all.
So I gave in to pressure from various people and decided to change to Vodafone. Because, another few years ago, I opened an account for my other daughter, (she being too young to do it herself), which she no longer uses.
For which, if I want to keep my current phone number, I need a special pac code which I can get from Orange by dialling customer services (when I'm not at home of course). Only Orange won't give it to me as I am not the account holder. So one sunny afternoon, me and daughter went to the Orange shop and obtained the code and for a week or two I carried it around in my bag against the day when I would feel I had the time and energy to enter a vodafone shop and make the change.
Some time after this, my handbag was stolen and in it was the piece of paper with the pac code on it. I went to the Orange shop and said look we've done this once, can you do it again? Well, no the number has expired now. Get your daughter to phone this number and they'll give it to her. They might even text it to your phone.
I phoned said Daughter and gave her the number and asked her to do the whole thing again. Oh, ok she said, I'm very busy just now but I'll try.
Shortly after, I asked if she could do it soon and it turned out she'd lost the number.
Perhaps I could pretend to be her. Right.
Armed with her ID code, and security code and of course, knowing her as I do, I thought this would be quite easy really. Immensely irritating and time consuming you know, but not really very hard as long as I kept my cool and had something to do while I waited for Orange to answer me. So this afternoon, I began the long business of phoning and waiting and pressing assorted numbers for assorted purposes till I got to a real person (all this had to be done in a car park in town, of course, since I don't have signal at home). The real person was very helpful but couldn't get through to the next layer of impenetrable customer assistance. So he said he'd phone me back. He did but I was out of signal. So I phoned back and went through the whole thing yet again. Finally I got to the last level of interrogation and she said, "are you that person who owns this phone?" "yes" I said bravely. After all I know my own daughter don't I? "Good", she said. "Can you tell me your date of birth"?
.
.
.
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I'm not good with numbers.
.
.
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I giggled hysterically and wondered if not knowing your own age was the same as not knowing your own mobile number. Perfectly normal.
.
Apparently not.
.
.
Are you the person who owns this phone? she asked accusingly or are you the third party?
??????
It seems I am the third party.

Daughter is very busy. She really doesn't want to spend half an hour waiting for these people to find each other amidst their many places for not helping customers achieve service. I don't blame her.

Do I really need signal at home? Do I really need my own (her own) number anyway? Do I really want a mobile phone at all? Or do I maybe want to throw the cursed thing into the nearest bin and become as much a dinosaur as my dearly beloved husband who can't send an email without me standing at his shoulder telling him which buttons to press.
(GAAGGHH!)
I suppose that's what you get for telling lies.

*I'm guessing the reason was the complicated process they wanted to put us through to get it changed.

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