Bagel Belly Blog

Mobile phone networks: institutionalised stupidity

Orange managed to render my mobile phone number useless today, the incompetent morons. I'll be unreachable by mobile phone for 24-48 hours, sorry about that. You can still contact my office number, where messages will be taken, or just use email - but be warned, I'm travelling again so it might take me a while to call you back.

It all started three weeks ago, when our bookkeeper needed copies of our phone bills in order to reconcile the accounts. I've been with o2 for a couple of years (since Vodafone messed up in Corfu and then messed up in Cyprus), so I headed on over to their web site.

Long story short: the o2 billing site was down, except they swore it wasn't depending on which department you called, there was some confusion over who owned the account, then a hard sell by o2 who refused to accept I didn't like their level of service, and finally after three days of chasing them, they agreed to give me the PAC I need to port my number elsewhere. Everything about the fiasco convinced me that o2 are incompetent morons.

Jump forward a week, and I call Orange after getting the new phone to make sure that international roaming was enabled on the account. It takes about 15 minutes on hold to reach a human operator. Orange tell me that as well as signing contracts in store, they'd quite like me to also fax through a password. They tell me this 30 minutes before I'm due to be on a plane. I tell them I'm on the road and could I email, but no - it has to be a fax. When I reach my destination, I borrow a printer and a fax, and the corner of an office from which to phone Orange and chastise them.

Four days later, after another 15 minute wait on the phone, they acknowledge that they've processed their queue of faxes, and have mislaid mine. Could I possibly email it through instead?

The following day (after 15 minutes, I think this is the usual level of service), they finally accept my credentials and let me give them the PAC to port my phone number, and tell me it will take one week to happen. Fast forward to today.

Around midday my old phone tells me the SIMM is no longer valid, but my new phone hasn't received the text message I should get to tell me to turn it off and then on again. Later today I start receiving comments from people telling me my phone number isn't working, so I phone Orange.

Apparently my calling plan has an invalid travel talk 50 bundle on it, and whenever they try to make changes (such as, for example, adding my phone number) everything gets rejected. In order to fix it the IT department must be emailed, and they have a turnaround time of 24-48 hours. And they can't be reached by phone.

So I've had this phone since 28th July, and I can't do anything with it. Even better, I now can't receive calls on my old phone. I am so impressed with Orange thus far. I can't wait to see how else they manage to screw up my communications.

(I thought about being polite and just registering mild irritation in this post, but I am paying extra for a business tariff, and Orange are messing with how I make my money. I think I'm entitled to be extremely annoyed at the inconvenience they are causing my customers, and the potential loss of earnings they are causing me. I would switch to another provider tomorrow, except I think by now it's safe to assume they are all equally bad.)