Everything everywhere or nothing nowhere

Customer focus is not the order of the day for most mobile phone companies.  (Apologies for another UK-centric post, but I imagine this happens world-wide.)  T-Mobile and Orange seemed to have combined their business into a new one called Everything Everywhere - or Nothing Nowhere as I like to think of it.

During the last year, the cost of sending an SMS message has been increased by a factor of four, when it is perfectly obvious that the actual cost of sending data has dropped.  For that reason, I jumped ship a few months ago and joined another network called Giffgaff, whose charges have been much more reasonable.  So far it has been a much better service both for my phone and for my mobile internet dongle and I have been sufficiently pleased with them to transfer another family to them, with a third and fourth to come soon.

So I wanted to get the PAC code to transfer the third over while keeping the same phone number.  All I needed was 25 pence credit to pay for the call to customer service (plus probably the same again to call for a second time after being cut off because of a weak signal).  But you can only top up with a minimum of £5, which would annoy me.  Therefore I decided to pay the 25p by calling from my land line.

45 minutes later, after listening to highly irritating canned music which was almost certainly designed to persuade me to ring off, I got through to an actual person, gave them all the details that I had already entered using the keypad, then was transferred to a second person who wanted the same.  I might have been getting a little irritated by then.  So was it reasonable to be lectured with 'don't use that sort of language with me sir' for simply saying that I was quite pissed off?  I can't help but feel even more annoyed by this.  Furthermore, after making an abject apology to the smarmy git it appears that he had not been particularly offended by it - he told me so. 

So perhaps they are trained to try to make customers feel guilty too!

But at least I've got the PAC code!