Chapter 5: 7th October 2009

Is it Really That Many?

Complaints Department
Vodafone Limited
Vodafone House
The Connection
Newbury
Berkshire
RG14 2FN

Sent via Royal Mail Recorded Delivery

Cc:
Facebook Community
Customer.care@vodafone.net

26th September, 2009

Re: ***** ******

Dear Sir,

Further to my previous four letters, I am still awaiting a response from yourselves regarding the small but significant matter of my stolen phone number. I originally wrote to you back on September 14th, and failing to get a reply I have written a further three times. However, I am yet to elude a response for your apparently service impaired company.

You may note that on my letter dated September 26th, after my last verbal conversations with yourselves, that, with some help from my friends over at Virgin, I have out-witted you and re-gained control of my number. The detail of this I will explain later. However, the afore mentioned letter was sent to 3 postal addresses for yourselves, and emailed to customer.care@vodafone.net in accordance with instructions from your own staff.

I was made some nice promises during my last phone calls. Amongst these were:

  • You will get a call back from a supervisor within 48 hours (The 3rd or 4th such promise – I lose count)
  • You will get a response from customer services within 72 hours if you email them.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that, as a communications company, someone there would have been able to pick up the phone. Obviously not. And clearly the art of writing a letter is lacking somewhat too. For information purposes, its now October 7th – 2 weeks since my last letter, and just over 2 weeks since we spoke.

Apparently its good to talk. But Vodafone couldn’t be bothered with a strapline.

So its been a comedy of errors so far – and I would hate to cover old ground, so I’ll leave it to you guys to read my previous communications. As I’ll explain later, I will provide you with multiple methods of following my letters should you have lost them.

Since I spent one and a half hours on the phone to yourselves trying to obtain my pac code so I could un-steal myself, I have had a lot more time on my hands. This is because I spoke to Virgin, to get my number transferred back. The nice people over there were very helpful as ever, but they were somewhat confused to learn that Vodafone had control of my number. It seems that Vodafone did not manage to actually port my number over correctly. Now, we shouldn’t be surprised by this should we? Err – No.

You couldn’t even steal it right! This also explained why your people could not find my pac code. There wasn’t one to give as I was never a Vodafone customer! So who knows how they came up with a number after 90 minutes – must have been generated by the lottery machine – and lets face it, at 14 million to 1, I have a better chance of getting a useful answer from Merlin, Arthur or even Pearl than from a Vodafone representative. Its still not going well over there is it?

The very nice and very helpful people at Virgin responded impeccably. The first person I spoke to took ownership of the issue. Within an hour I had received 2 calls with progress reports, and within a couple of hours the issue was resolved. Now that is what you call service.

I have, once again, taken the step of cancelling your illegal direct debit. Please feel free to place my account on hold again. I won’t notice this time. Please also feel free to write to me – I will act accordingly and ignore you.

I also got (very) bored one day and read the terms and conditions you sent through. Apart from the bit that states “You might not bother delivering texts and MMS’s, but will charge anyway”, I was surprised to find you actually state under “Ending this agreement” that:

You may end this agreement by writing to us if we don’t do something fundamental that we should have done under this agreement within 7 days of you asking us in writing.

Lucky then really, that we never had an agreement. Otherwise I would have to write to you to end it. And you would ignore me some more.

In my first letter, dated 14th September, I pointed out that despite the fact you had messed up so badly I was still willing to come to an agreement as you were sponsoring Lewis Hamilton. However, I have since noticed he is not doing at all well this year. I also note that you are transferring your allegiances to the red team next year. Thank you – I never liked that Alonso chap anyway, and I guess you just ruined his season. Shouldn’t worry though – if he complains – just ignore him too.

So, where do we go from here? Well clearly I have spent considerable time and effort correcting your mistakes. Therefore I expect an offer of compensation for the time and in-convenience. You may note that I have already had correspondence with ofcom regarding this issue, and they are suggesting we refer to Othello as a next step. Obviously you have 8 weeks from my first complaint to do this under ofcom’s terms.

I am a patient man, but i just don’t know if I can wait that long without a sign that there is life behind the computer that hates me so much? So I have been looking at other avenues that may facilitate communications with yourselves. These include various televisual productions and several publishers.

So I will let you decide whether you want to read my letters on your own paper, or one you pick up on the train to work.

Yours Sincerely,

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