Your call may be recorded for training porpoises

Well, my attempt to maintain a sunny disposition throughout the whole week has been scuppered and its only Tuesday. We are not even at Wednesday, the Hump of the Week or Thursday, Dreaded Worst Day of the Week Always.

This is the fault of Three Mobile (or 3 Mobile, whichever you like) who are possibly the worse mobile phone company in the, albeit brief, history of mobile phone companies. Without question.*

I am all grumpy about non-UK call centres now, which annoying because I can’t be doing with all that call centre location thinly veiled racism nonsense. It’s not as though British people are not breathtakingly rude and stupid at times. I’m only grumpy about it because it is something to be grumpy about. Like finding someone utterly pestilent and then noticing that they have unfortunate hair and calling them Pube Head when actually just calling them a generically offensive yet comical nickname would do just as well, probably better.

Imagine the horror: on the 8 September my mobile phone packed up. The screen went blank and it refused to respond to my frantic button jabbing. So I executed the ‘pull the plug out’ manoeuvre, the fulcrum about which my IT expertise pivots, by removing the battery and putting it back in again. Then it wouldn’t switch on again. The little tinker.

So I phoned Three. They sent me to a Three stockist to test the phone to see whether the handset or the battery was broken. Why they made me do this I do not know as I had to send both back anyway but this is only infuriating in retrospect. It was the handset. They picked my phone (and battery and charger) up from work the following day and returned it three working days later as promised. Which wass actually five days, but again with retrospect. Gosh, didn’t I sing the praises of Three from the very rooftops? ‘What a marvellous service,’ I sang from the very rooftops whilst skipping. ‘Everyone should have a Three phone. The customer service is exemplary. They are a phone company who cares about the customer. Their call centre is in Mumbai, where they are so helpful and nice. Look at the trees, look at the birds. Sing, praise Hallelujah.’

Then on the 18 September it broke again, in exactly the same way, having worked for a total of five days. So I rang Three and arranged for them to pick it up again the next day. They didn’t. I rang them back and they said they would pick it up the following day. They didn’t. They did manage to pick it up on the third day after I was forced to bellow across the continents at them.

The phone was supposed to come back yesterday. But it never put in an appearance. So, I rang them this morning.

‘I quite understand your irritation,’ said the girl.
‘Where is my phone?’ I said.
‘It is at the repairers still,’ she said.

I listed the reasons why this was unacceptable beginning with the newsflash that my phone has been out of service for 15 days this month and ending with the stunning revelation that no one called me to tell me my phone would not be arriving when they said it would be and this was terribly rude and if there is one thing to destroy my fragile joyfulness its unnecessary rudeness. **

‘And now you will make it all better,’ I said, all calmness now spent of fury. ‘You may speak to your supervisor if you want. I will hold.’
‘I quite understand your irritation,’ the girl said.
‘I am now holding,’ I said.
‘I quite understand your irritation,’ she said.
I sang Windmills of Your Mind to her in my finest Muzak Voice.
‘I am putting you on hold,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have already put you on hold. You are the one on hold.’
‘But you are singing to me,’ she said, perplexed.
‘No. I am singing at you. Because you are on hold,’ I said.
‘Hold please.’

I didn’t think she would come back but she did.

Sadly, she only returned to tell me that she would ring me back shortly with a solution to my problem and that she was still very understanding of my irritation. I am waiting for her to call, hunched over my phone twitching and snarling. It has been three hours. By the time I get the phone back I will have forgotten where I put the sim card for safe keeping.

Oh.
My.
God.

Where the hell is the sim card?

And now my fabled lunchtime run will have to be of the bad mood improving type instead of the good mood enhancing type which I much prefer.

Damn you Three mobile, damn you. Also, where the hell is my phone, you Pube Heads?


*Please, gentle reader, do leave me a comment with details of your evil phone company as when I finally escape my contract in 2145 I would like to avoid other evil phone companies. This way we can make the world a nicer place for one and other.

**This paragraph should really begin lower case and then become uppercase growing into an enormous angry red font but I as a Libran I am too aesthetically sensitive for any of that (or am I? I’m not sure. Yes. No. Maybe. Eek.) Also, the whole post should be littered with exclamation marks but I can’t bring myself to do that either. I don’t think my natural merriment would recover ever. Ever.***

*** End of rant.