Bureaucratic Torture

Today has been a nightmare of incompetence, which mercifully we have rarely experienced in our combined 70 years on this planet.

Last week, while it was still September, we rang the company which are shipping over our boxes and paid the customs levy using a credit card that would expire at the end of September. We explained that it would expire at the end of September and we were sending it through early so that they could charge it during September as we particularly wanted it charged to that account. They agreed to do this and said it would go through that day.
On Monday I rang them to get the receipt number to include in the paperwork we need to send back to them. They told me that they knew we had paid and not to worry about the receipt number as it was already firmly in their records that we had paid.

So, it was surprising to get a phone call from them this morning to complain that the credit card we had given them was expired.

Thankfully my ever gracious husband took the call.

But what really destroyed our day today was the incompetence of a certain telephone company which must remain nameless but has been dubbed ‘Bureaucratic Torture’ by ourselves as descriptive of the kind of service it offers.

We contacted them on 20th September to get our phone connected. On 18th September, we believe, the previous tenants of our flat disconnected their line with this company. On the 20th September I was informed that there had never been a line to our unit and we would need to pay a cool $A300 to have one installed.

I was slightly prepared for this. The Land Agents had warned us this would happen. The Jensen’s had heard that is had happened to multiple people in our building. So, I was assertive and suggested that this was not in fact the case and I could see a phone line in our wall, but they maintained that there was not a phone line in our flat and that I would need to have an engineer to come out and install one. Eventually I reluctantly agreed and they said they’d ring me back to organise this. (We have been told by others that if there is a phone line in place then Bureaucratic Torture won’t charge us, but said company hasn’t been prepared to admit such a possibility).

On the following Monday, not having had a call back, I rang again. I was told not to ring on Mondays as they are particularly busy on Mondays. I held on despite this discouragement, hoping to talk to someone, only to be cut off after being on hold for 45 minutes.

I rang again the following day after 1pm, as instructed by the ‘customer service message’ and spoke to a real person, after only 20 minutes on hold. She informed me that if they were to connect the phone we would need to have a 12 month contract with them. However, with her I made progresss and arranged a date and time for the engineer to come and install our phone line (which she also maintained had never been installed). He or she was to arrive from 8am to 1pm today.

Today between the hours of 8am to 1pm we waited (in shifts) for the engineer. Given our experience with this company, we weren’t shocked and horrified when he or she did not arrive. However, undaunted, we went down to Carphone Warehouse (who are really quite competent it seems), and discussed whether we need to have a physical phone line at all. The sad news is that we do, and in our case the only company in England who can activate our phone line are our friends, the Bureaucratic Torturers. We are in that unfortunate 30% of the country for whom Bureaucratic Torturers have a monopoly—Virgin, which would do it much faster and cheaply can’t service us.

So, we went down to the public phone to call them and explain that as much as we’d love to go elsewhere we were stuck with them, and would they mind very much getting their act together. We were on hold this time for 50 minutes. A harassed sounding Indian man took my call and apologised profusely when I explained what had happened. When I didn’t get mad at him (I confess I was more broken spirited than godly at this point), and accepted his apology, he then thanked me profusely for accepting his apology, which made me feel very sorry for the guy. I can’t imagine how disheartening it would be to work for this company – I feel ashamed just being their customer.

However, he then apologised to me again for all the inconvenience in such a way as to let me know that the inconvenience wasn’t actually over yet. He told me that he was not going to put a call through to the engineers because that would take 10 working days. Instead he told me he would put a priority call through to them. This would mean that they would call me back within 3 days. I checked that they did in fact have our mobile number (a Virgin mobile – it took me less than 15 minutes to arrange our mobile phone). So, this company which hadn’t kept its appointment had no mechanism with which to correct the fault in any sense and say, make another appointment. No, they couldn’t do that. They would ring me back. I must confess I didn’t believe them, but as there no other option I asked for a reference number (which are useless, but make me feel better), and finished the call.

On the way home, less than half an hour later, we received a call from this company. Unfortunately, I wasn’t expecting this at all and the phone was buried deep in my bag, so we only had a message left on our voicemail. This, it turned out was a Good Thing because the engineer informed us that no-one had attended our appointment from 8am to 1pm that day because no-one had been scheduled to do so. He seemed remarkably relaxed about this. However he had managed to schedule another appointment for us this coming Monday from 8am to 1pm and had organised for the engineer to call us closer to the time to confirm more precisely the time of the appointment. He didn’t mention whether anyone was actually scheduled to attend this appointment.

Yesterday I got a letter in the mail from this company confirming our direct debit details and informing us that they would be charging us whatever we owed them directly from our bank account unless we contacted them. Frankly, it disturbs me more than I can express that these people have our bank account details. And it also disturbs me that there is any discussion that we owe them anything, monetary or otherwise, for their spectacular lack of service.

So our phone saga continues. Mercifully it is the only real saga. All other bureaucratic issues are going well, and the one I was most concerned about – the medical/hospital issues – are all sorted. However, we cannot have internet in our flat until this comedy of errors coughs up its final laugh. I can’t wait to hear the fat lady sing. I’m sure she’ll be singing ‘Rule Britannia’. JMB