New phone time
It’s got to the time again - my contract has been over for a while and finally Orange pissed me off enough to make me jump ship. Why? No one reason - more several small irritations over the last couple of months.
Firstly, since their takeover/merger of/by Wannadoo their customer service appears to have taken a dive - might be unconnected, I dunno. I don’t really care. It does peeve me when they seem to be outsourcing to Indian call centres and taking an increasing amount of time to anwer the phone.
Secondly, when I signed up with them I said I didn’t really want paper bills as I manage my account online. They said that it wasn’t an option but it didn’t matter as the paper bills are available online as a pdf. I (stupidly?) assumed that this was a pdf of the *actual* bill that I was sent each month. Bzzzzzzt wrong. For the last couple of months it seems that my paper bills (yes, the ones I don’t read and didn’t want) have had a warning that I need to text the word BILL to some number within 10 days or I will be charged an extra £1.50 for the unwanted itemised paper bill. The area where this is printed appears oddly empty on the pdf versions that I’ve been reading. Gits.
Finally, my phone is getting a bit knackered and tatty so I thought I’d go for an upgrade. Online the phone I chose was clocking in at a whopping upgrade fee of 180 quid - new customers get it for nowt. I know I can’t expect a deal as good as a new customer but still, that’s taking the piss a bit. After many calls to their customer rentention dept (funnily enough, that’s never a foreign call centre and they alway seem to answer the phone quickly) and I get this knocked down to 60 quid and a slightly cheaper contract but they still won’t throw (better Jose?) in data of any sort - 4 quid for 4MB is the best they can do. I think not.
So, having wrestled with O2 for a bit (apparantly they are *much* better now but I’ll give ‘em a year or two before I bang my head against that particular wall again) and now got pissed off with Orange I’m left with Vodaphone or Tmobile. Looking at the Tmobile flext with web’n'walk tariff (or whatever the silly name is) leaves it as a bit of a no brainer - they win hands down. The only slight worry is that their reception is not supposed to be too good (although I had a One2One phone years back that wasn’t tooooooo bad) but I’ve taken the gamble and signed up. I’ve ended up paying a bit less a month for more mins, more texts and unlimited data. Also ended up with a better phone than Orange were offering as well (The sony Ericsson K800i - scarely has a better digital camera built in than the camera I bought a few years ago for 250 quid!)
Ordered yesterday at 4pm and phone turned up this morning at 9am. So far so good. Signal here at home seems better than orange to that’s a pleasant surprise as well. One slight flaw in their service so far was that despite the phone being advertised as having a free 256MB memory card they haven’t sent me one. A quick phonecall and they promise me one tomorrow - being sent royal mail special delivery! (a little over kill for something the size of your fingernail but still, nice :))
I’ll wait to see if it actually turns up 
Also need my PAC from orange which they promise is in the post…
