Your Call is Expensive to Us

Vodafone was the first in Australia to implement a general assistance service.  I've been using it for years, it's really very cool.  So cool that Telstra has followed suit, only about a decade too late... but I digress.

'123' is great because you can call them about anything at all.  If you need the price of an item on a website; the latest currency exchange rates or the hottest item from your favourite fashion blog while you're out shopping -- they'll look it up.

In fact it has been my experience that the staff really like that kind of thing, because most people just call for boring old directory assistance.

Anyway, yesterday, after some difficulty connecting to GPRS on my iPAQ I remembered that Voda sent a notice informing customers about changes to value-added services, so I called 123 just to check whether GPRS was still active on my account.  I was taken aback by the guy who took the call.

Here's the paraphrased conversation:

This is when he sighs in frustration and I give up on him and hang up.  I really hope they use my call for 'quality and training purposes' because that guy's a fucking arsehole and should have someone breathing down his neck for the next few months telling him to stop asking stupid questions.

I'm sure he thought he was being helpful, but really he was just unwilling to accept that someone might not want to do things his way.

Anyway I called back immediately and spoke to a nice young lady whose first response was "bear with me just a tick sir..." closely followed by "yes, your account shows GPRS is active, may I have your email address so I can send you the settings?"

I was off the phone with her in less than 30 seconds, including her thanking me for calling Vodafone.