Bloody Telecom (BT)

Ok, so I was in a bit of a mood yesterday.
Sorry folks... the pills are kicking in now...

After someone's helpful comment, I discovered that Virgin were doing a far better offer, so I rang BT to cancel what I'd just arranged with them.

Given that I was leaving them, I was expecting to be a low priority call and to be kept on hold a lot. But good business sense or not, they were really taking the piss.

First I ended up in some kind of loop:
- Statement A: "You can organise your account online at www...."
- (music)
- Statement B
- (music)
- Statement A again
- ... etc

After 7 or 8 minutes of this I got fed up (as I assume they wanted me to) so hung up & tried again.

This time I purposefully rang the wrong departments; I figured then I'd speak to a real person sooner.

Real person #1 said he'd put me through to the "correct department" - it was a different pre-recorded loop. Bastard.

Real person #2 was a techie in an Indian call centre; he insisted on putting me on hold for 3-4 minutes at a time while he talked to his colleague to give him details of my account... and yet refused to hand me over to his colleague so that I could give him the details myself. Odd... almost like he was taking ages on purpose...

After 15 minutes of this, I talk to Real person #3, a bloke with an East-End gangster accent who told me I didn't want to leave BT now, did I? Sounded really quite intimidating.
Eventually he gave in trying to convince me and put me on hold for a further full ten minutes before finally picking back up and saying it was all sorted, the account was cancelled. Phew!

Three quarters of an hour it took me to leave BT.
I'm sure it didn't need to take them so long.

Bet it doesn't take anywhere near as long to get customers to join BT...
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In other news, Orange have changed the voice of their automated system. Gone is the stern, older lady who sounds like a strict school mistress; she's been replaced by a sexier-sounding younger woman.

I swear, that computer was flirting with me...