[ILUG-Social] eircom customer care, one man's skirmish

[Caolan McNamara]

Rented new accomodation, nice agency folk asked me if I wanted a phone line
installed, yes I said, not right now (subtext: because you've just taken all my
ready cash in deposit and first months rent :-() but certainly in a month or
so. I'll send in a application for you says she, fine. Get from eircom "fees
are x, fill out this thing and give us some cash and you're off", good good,
I'll just wait a while and I'll fill in this sucker and get my phone organized.
Letter still sitting in drawer, never got around to it.

Got new letter from eircom a month later, please give us 120 quid because we
installed your phone a month ago and thats 80, and then theres line rental from
a month ago to now as well and so forth.

Huh?, what phone line ?, line rental for may ?, what the ? Hang on a second,
phone eircom, "hi eircom, you got a little carried away there, stuck in the
line without authorization from me, being connected is news to me, this is the
first I heard of it, I don't even have a handset. No real problem, I like a
line, but theres the little matter of charging me for the rental when I didn't
know I had it, tell you what we could do, I'll take the line and pay the
installation fees after all and we'll start again, and we'll forget about this
rental for may malarky"

Too complex a decision for the drone I was with so was pucked to master drone
who just phoned, first I get an earful of agressive woman waffling about "going
ahead in good faith", with the defence that "it happens every day". Hang on
here, Im a customer, theres been an honest mistake, I don't think its mine, Im
pretty sure its yours, but hey its not a big deal. But so what if it "happens
every day" that you install without getting the actual go ahead, you can feck
off if you think I'm paying for the usage of a stealth installation. Lets be
friends and how about sending me a new bill for installation on its own dated
from today, "cant do that, can't amend a bill thats been sent out". Right fine
then, if you want to be like that, what if I get disconnected and then reapply
are you going to charge some kind of reconnection fee which is a penalty on top
of a connection fee, "no we don't work like that", with the implication that
that sort of low behaviour could be expected from the likes of me but not a
moral upstanding co like eircom. So anyway thats the solution I took,
disconnect and reapply. Sigh

Amusing that my problem is a too efficient service. Anyhow, point of it all is
that if a phone installation is requested from eircom over the phone by anyone
for anyone else they will go right ahead and install the line immediately
without any extra validation or end user feedback. For fun and games phone in
and ask for 10 lines each to be installed for a couple of people on your shit
list and see what happens. If I could go anywhere else for the local loop I
would.

C.
-- 
Caolan McNamara               |  caolan at skynet.ie  
http://www.skynet.ie/~caolan  |  +353 86 8161184
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons