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

[Joe Desbonnet]

In fairness that behaviour is usually a plus. Its nice to be able to have a
phone line the day you move in. That would not be possible if they/you had
to go through a formal approval process involving the use of a pen,
envelopes and those stampy yokes that An Post sell.

Actually quick poll: when was the last time anyone on this list used the
postal system to send something? I think its been over a year in my case!

But as you said, honest mistakes do happen. And its easily proved (no calls
in or out is not the normal usage pattern of a phone line) so they should
handle it gracefully.

I've always found Eircom's land line service great.

Joe.

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 02:37:34PM +0100, Caolan McNamara wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group Social Events: social at linux.ie
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