Richard Baum

The sponge-brained halfwits at Orange Broadband have made a spectacular, tumbling re-entry into my life this evening, with a letter demanding that I pay them £40. And after a particularly useless telephone call to them which got me not one millimetre closer to sorting out their mess, I feel it only right to inform my tiny readership about them and their foolish ways.

Let me begin by putting their customer-service shoddiness into context: As someone who has worked in a variety of public sector settings, each one devoid of any sense of urgency, and frequently entirely bereft of staff from about 14:30 on a Friday, I have encountered my fair share of dodgy customer services. As a Councillor trying to get Bury’s Six Town Housing to remove its head from its backside for half a second, I have experienced even worse. But Orange Broadband make even the most lethargic Housing Officer at Six Town look like a fawning, bowing, scraping butler who has just graduated summa-cum-laude from the Harvard School of Brown Nosing.

They are, without exception, buffoons. I must have spoken to thirty of them in my time, and not one of them has done a single thing remotely useful for me. I would have had as much joy speaking to the dialling tone. Their know-nothing, slack-jawed idiocy goes beyond the annoying and is actually a joy to behold, simply because it confirms my suspicion that even if I were to sell my brain to the highest bidder on eBay, and then look for a job with nothing in my head but the stitches, I could still find gainful employment working in the Orange Broadband call centre.

At one point last year, they cut off my broadband service for three months for no reason. Each time I rang their far-off call centre, I was met with a different baffled joker without the foggiest grasp of what my problem was or how to fix it. The excuse changed every day, the promises got more outlandish as I got more angry, and the solution arrived without warning or explanation after three long months. I still don’t know what went wrong or how it was fixed.

When I moved house I vowed to leave the world of Orange Broadband behind, and so whilst the ink on the property contract was still wet, I joyously rang my far away call-centre friends and told them that I was cancelling.

But alas, yet oddly predictably, the message appears not to have got through. And so today I was sent a bill for £40, and a letter telling me that because I hadn’t paid them anything for six months, they had had to close my account. Of course, had the lady in the call centre understood my phone call when I cancelled, she would have gathered my intention to cancel my account and the impending cancellation of my Direct Debit. But clearly the language I used in the phone call was in a code beyond understanding. After all, I said “I intend to cancel my account, and thus inform you of the impending cancellation of my Direct Debit,” which is highly ambiguous and open to various interpretations. 

Silly me, because when she said “Fine,” I imagined she meant “Fine.” Whereas in fact, of course, she meant “I have no idea what you are talking about. Goodbye.”

So now apparently I owe them £40, and they are threatening to “take legal action.” Which would be amusing, if the bureaucracy involved weren’t so annoying. I have no doubt whatsoever that if I were ever to get a court summons, I could muster about 10,000 people to testify to the general awfulness of Orange’s Customer Services, and demonstrate with diamond-solid proof that the chances of my cancellation instruction finding its way from The Call Centre At The End Of The Universe all the way back to Accounts was nil. Sadly, it probably won’t get that far, and the bill will lay on some credit reference agency’s file somewhere, meaning that their error will cost me the chance of a cheap  mortgage in a few years.

The thought of dealing with that makes me full of rage.

And yet I can’t solve it. I tried to tonight, but the guy in the call centre genuinely had not a clue what I was on about. He asked me for my land line number three times. Three times. And then, in the ultimate irony, my attempts at being helpful backfired spectacularly: I only received the bill when my former landlord posted it through the door of my new house today. We’ve moved on, you see. So, after our man in with the Brintey Spears headet in the call centre far, far away re-affirmed the looming court case and the outstanding bill which he said “must be settled in full as soon as possible,” I offered him the opportunity to take down the new address so as to allow me to engage in conversation with Orange without the landlord as an intermiediary. “No,” he said “We can’t take any new details. Your account has been closed.”

Idiots.

Rick