I have something nice to say about a phone company!
You read that right—I can’t believe it either but I actually had a positive customer service experience with a phone company.
First, my UK number: +44 7563 399018. (But of course, please be mindful of timezones.)
So my first order of business on Saturday morning was to get a phone sorted out. I went to Carphone Warehouse and ended up deciding on the O2 Text and Web tariff. (As an aside, pay-as-you-go mobile phone plans are a total confusopoly and trying to work out which plan from which company offered the most value for my unlocked iPhone was nigh on impossible.)
The SIM the guy originally brought out defaulted to a different plan but he did some kind of magic and said he’d changed it over and I’d get a text message saying so; then all I had to do was top up with £10 and I’d get unlimited (well, 500GB) of data for the month. I checked it out in the store and 3G worked so I toddled off on my merry way, enjoying the benefits of a country with a truly first-world mobile phone system.
I made maybe four minutes of calls, sent some texts and downloaded a meg or two of data via Google Maps and Twitter. So I was quite surprised when I realised I’d burnt through my initial £10 three hours later. As the iPhone’s quite “chatty” with its data usage (even after disabling push notifications), every minute or three it’d try and access the internet and then vibrate with a carrier notification that my account was out of credit. And of course I couldn’t make any more calls or send any texts. Very annoying.
After an exasperated interaction with the staff at another Carphone Warehouse location and an attempt to talk to O2 customer service I gave up and went to meet my London-based Burner friend Paul for lunch. After lunch I borrowed his phone and called O2 support again (while calls to the top-up line are free, calls to the support line cost 25p, so if you’ve been screwed out of all your credit you can’t call up to sort it out).
And here’s where something amazing happened. I managed to talk to a human being relatively promptly (shock!) I explained the story to him only once (surprise!) and within about two minutes he’d worked out what had happened, changed me onto the correct tariff and refunded me the £6 I’d been gouged for Internet access earlier (WTF?!)
So, I can recommend O2’s mobile phone service in the UK. Having said that in public I now nervously look outside for the other horsemen of the apocalypse.
