Surviving Customer Services (Part 2)

Now modern customer services has taught us urban survivors a thing or two about self-sufficiency. Place any modern day survivor in the control room of a nuclear reactor steaming towards meltdown with nothing other than the wrong type of spanner and phone labelled ‘customer services’ you know we’ll be down in the reactor core vigorously hammering away at the containment shell like we're auditioning to join the Muppets as Animal's replacement. Really, just anything other than call that number. By dialling, not only are launching yourself onto the cruel seas of misunderstanding, you are also admitting defeat. Now it’t not so bad to reach out for help if it’s you’re standing next to a nuclear reactor that’s boiling like a kettle filled with minestrone soup and is about to turn western Europe’s entire sheep population into an all-conquering army of irradiated Leo Sayers. Less good if you’re missing a screw for your Sukva table and chair set.

Reaching out to customer services is not like asking a grown-up, it’s like asking a grown-up who eats half-gnawed hunks of saliva-sauced KFC out of the bins behind the bus shelter and washes it down with Chateau White Lightening to help your solve quadratic equations.

It has to happen though. Sometimes we’re tossed powerlessly about like a seasick landlubber by events and circumstance. Take the other day as an example. Now, I am connected to the Internets via a tautened length of Victorian-era string, and have my broadband delivered by a company called Pipex. The grand corporate machinations of acquisitions-and-mergers have been turning in the meantime and now Pipex is TalkTalk. Which, I’m sure is utterly super and may the managers of TalkTalk be blessed for their successful acquisition with a magic dog that shits gold bullion, but I just wish they would stop telling me about it, and how absolutely wonderful it be for me. I’m really not as excited about it as they are, babbling away like teenage lovers. Little do they know their relationship won’t stay like that. There’s disillusion, gradual contempt, hate, and thrown crockery somewhere in their future, they just don’t know it yet. And divorce battle of over the magic dog that shits gold bullion will dwarf even that petty scrap at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (you know, 264 hours in).

Now there is one thing about my broadband service that’s important to note: it’s called ‘Pipex Xtreme’ –  which proudly declared itself 'unlimited'. Now had assumed that didn’t mean unlimited Pipexes, delighful though they sound, but rather unlimited broadband. As many bytes as could squeeze through my skinny little phone line, like stuffing an elephant down a snake and then ordering it dessert.

So, when TalkTalk cunningly slip a distinctly not-unlimited 40 GB/month cap into the smaller print of a letter headed “A Small Change to Your Direct Debit” rather than “HA, YOUR BROADBAND IS NOW UN-UNLIMITED, SUCK ON THAT! (Oh and by the way, we’re taking your money and using it to buy our boss a dog that shits gold bullion)” I feel a slight build-up of what is best called grumble magma. Not enough to erupt, but enough to set the green ink needle wobbling on nearby seismographs. It was late at night, so I located the customer services email of Pipex and sent my uncommonly reasoned response to mildly demand that they return my broadband back to its full, unrestrained glory. Now, I’ve only dealt with Pipex’s attempts at customer services once before, and it didn’t disappoint.  Admittedly, I had set my expectations lower the a midget limbo dancer's world record attempt bar. And sadly it was too late to take more effective path of writing the message on a piece of paper, stuffing it in a bottle, and then taking  the train to Southend to fling it from the end of the pier. Instead I was forced to send it thrumming down that piece of antique telecommunications string.

I anticipated a quick and simple solution to my problem...