So what’s the general protocol when you want a new mobile phone? You work out what’s ‘cool,’ what flips and spins and slides to reveal key pads, touch-screens and handwriting recognising pens. What has wifi, 3g and most importantly, Facebook twenty-four hours a day even if you’re in the middle of the Sahara desert. Once you’ve got all that figured out the next step is to walk into a mobile phone shop and be cajoled into various contracts so tight, that escaping from them would make Houdini proud. Don’t underestimate the power of your signature and the knots it can tie you into…
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“£25 month, for the internet dongle and you get a free laptop. Simples. Yes we’ve done a coverage check, yah yah it will totally work where you live. Smile smile, here’s £50 because we’re giving you the first two months of internet free, because we are so nice here at this macabre house for the electronically challenged, (otherwise known as 'Phones 4U'. We just want to give you free stuff. And that’s all.”
The £50 that has been placed, in cash, into my palm, is far more likely to end up being spent in River Island than being swallowed up in my endless overdraft to pay for internet, so it’s not really free, is it.
I came in for a phone and somehow I now have internet and a laptop too. I’m not pleading innocence due to stupidity; I’m aware that these people are working on commission. I’m also aware that the sales advisor beaming at me called Adam is about seventeen, still has braces, and this will probably the only job he’ll ever have that he gets to wear a suit in. But, I am of the mind that when people in suits in shops tell you things, they’re not lying. I have faith in humanity. If Adam tells me he has activated my sim card and set up my direct debit, why should I doubt him? I’m not going to lean across his computer and double check. If two days later my mobile phone is telling me it’s not activated, and month later I have a phone call imploring as to why I didn’t set up a direct debit, why should I not be terribly surprised? This is Great Britain; if I have a problem with my various electrical equipment and a woman with a silver plastic tag saying “store manager” gives me a phone number, where I’m assured I’ll receive help- why on earth would I think she had given me an airport car park phone number instead?
( Imagine my surprise when after repeating a well-rehearsed rant down the telephone, I was told by a bemused gentleman at the other end of the line that he didn’t know anything about mobile phones or internet;
“If you can’t park it at Heathrow, then I can’t help you love,” were the words of wisdom offered to me.)
If airport car parking is not the line of enquiry you’re looking for, I’d advise you to steer clear of my local overly lit, bawdy mobile phone shop. Either that or the store manager will shout at your mother down the telephone because that was the remarkable outcome of my visit there.
My mother is quite the expert when it comes to customer service complaints; she could get free meal and two tickets to Disney land from complaining about a coffee in a McDonalds. But I would have paid good money to see my mother’s face on the end of the line, as the store manager started waving her hands in the air, her neck convulsing so violently I thought she was going to give herself whiplash. The conversation from my end with me sitting in the store trying to return faulty equipment, the manager on the phone to my mother who was trying to help- went as follows:
"Listen to me yeh, coz you’re not listening to me right now yeh, let me speak yeh, I don't appreciate the way your speaking to me right now yeh, this isn’t my fault, its nothing to do with me, I’m trying to help so let me speak."
Impressive people skills there Little Miss Store Manager. Bravo.
Working in bars and restaurants from Malaga to Essex, the one rule I’ve found to be repeated more than any other is that ‘the customer is always right,’ the translation of this being: no matter what a customer says or does to you, no matter how exhausted or fed up you are, do not, under any circumstances be rude to them. Be rude to them behind their back, swear blue murder in the staff room, spit in their dessert, but don’t be rude directly.
(I’m not for a second admitting that this could be found anywhere on my curriculum vitae, but if an overweight, abusive customer proceeds to shout profanities at their waitress infront of an entire restaurant of customers complaining about the quality of their lard-covered potato wedges -taking in to consideration that they have already eaten of half of them- that waitress cannot be held responsible for the contents of the crème caramel dessert offered to them as a ‘gesture of goodwill.’)
Inbetween this exchange of “yeh’s” and neck twitching, Little Miss Store Manager lets slip in a random moment of bonding as we both tire from yelling, that she likes to close the store at 4pm when she thinks no ones looking- she told me not to tell anyone including head office or her other manager. It was my opening statement in my rather impressive complaints letter to head office.
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Weeks of therapeutic ranting and raving left me with a phone that finally worked, connected to a direct debit that didn’t trail off into oblivion. Bravo. However, then followed the interesting matter of the love-child of disaster and technology that was produced along the way; a twenty-four month contract for internet that didn’t work in my area, but as they didn’t advertise the fact that they’d abolished their 14 day return policy, conveniently before signing two years of my life away, I had some beautifully complicated-looking equipment sitting in my room that was draining money out of my bank account each month as well as draining life out of my soul with every dead-end conversation I had with various dense members of staff.
If your name is Adam and you are a pubescent sales advisor at a dead-end mobile phone shop, take off the suit and get another job, or I’m going to come and flush your head down a toilet one day soon.
Eight weeks, two letters and actual tears later, I managed to worm myself out of that catastrophe aswell, realising somewhere along the line that I’m not designed for the real world of contracts, bills and responsibility. I belong on a beach- with a pay as you go Nokia.
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