The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Alan]

So Evri used to be our reliable delivery guy around here. I think he’s on holiday because it’s been getting late these last two weeks.

They have at least had the decency to write on the parcel the reason for them being late.

Spoiler

[Sly Boots]

[Lenny Solidus]

Just a few days ago the wife and I got into a heated discussion when she expressed interest in wanting to relocate to a different ISP, I argued that we'd had almost zero issues with our current one we exceeded the speed we were paying for, and it had easily been the most reliable provider we'd had above BT, SKY and Virgin.

The ISP in question we are currently on suddenly out of nowhere went from Vodafone to Vodafucked as we just went over 30 hours without internet, something near every device in the house relies on, even our heating. Dvd players were dragged out from every corner of the house all of a sudden and we spent a good four hours waiting in a queue on the phone just to be hung up on, no texts or contact of any kind to let us know what the hell even was going on. It's still a little spotty even now but hopefully that resolves soon.

Anyway, it was clearly not the best of times, but it was a very prevalent almost necessary reminder of how much our lives are wrapped up in being connected every second of every hour of every day and just how much we can take it completely for granted.

Also, offline gaming exists. Thank goodness.

[Animalmother]

So you're saying your wife sabotaged Vodafone just to make a point?

[Mantis]

Well my Amazon saga continues. Sent an email off to a bunch of their email addresses that I found last week to give them one final shot at fixing things for me. Most of them bounced back as no longer being able to receive inbound emails. One responded from an Amazon India email basically just telling me to upload my ID again and then ring them to go through some verification questions. The phone number they gave me doesn't accept inbound calls.

Funnily enough the regular customer service line had no idea what I was on about when I rang them about it.

I've just emailed their privacy team to threaten them with a DPA complaint with ICO and given them 30 days to fix it all. Let's see if that has any effect.

I suspect they will fly into action. Firms live in genuine fear of GDPR findings being upheld, the fines can be immense.

Well I don't know if the email I received the other day was prompted by the GDPR complaint notice I sent them or the email I sent a week or so before with a copy of my ID on. But Amazon replied to me the other day telling me they couldn't verify the ID and that I needed to have a telephone interview to confirm some details.

I was meant to book the call via a survey form they sent in the email and input my case ID reference. Not only did they never give me a reference number to input, but the form link also goes to an inactive dead page which you can't actually interact with in any way.

So that's the ICO submission sent today!

Shocking how an organisation so big can be so bad.

[Animalmother]

All this is to just cancel your account with them? A fucking phone interview?

It's not that they're bad, they know that the vast majority of people just give up at a certain point and keep the account open. But that goes above and beyond.

[Mantis]

Not even that mate. All that just to get them to change my phone number on the account.

[Animalmother]

That is awe inspringly fucking unreal!

[Wrathbone]

Trying to renew my Sky broadband package as it's out of contract (£66 a month OOC vs £39 on contract, which is obscene really). You'd think this would be their simplest, easiest process, given that I'm trying to give them my money, but no. The renewals page says Sky broadband isn't available at my address... from where I'm currently using Sky broadband to post this. If I go to Uswitch (where there are other options I may yet consider, but honestly I'm happy with Sky and their current standard router), it does let me select various Sky packages for my address, and it's only at the point of logging in where it says not available.

So I went to the 'help' chatbot, which is about as useless as you'd expect and it sent me off to the Sky Community forum, which directed me to find a phone number on a page where the number no longer exists. So then they sent me to Twitter, which it turns out doesn't offer Sky support anymore, then ventured to Facebook, where another chatbot told me to text a mobile number. The mobile responded as a third chatbot, which sent me a link back to the Sky website, where eventually I got a number to call. The automated call told me to go to the forum, at which point I wailed involuntarily, and that put me through to a human. The human spent 15 minutes talking to an engineer, and it seems my account is flagged as pending cancellation for some reason, and they can't easily remove the block because something has gone arse over tit on the backend. So now I'm waiting for a callback next Monday to see if they've fixed it.

Jesus H breakdancing Christ, what a rigmarole. It's not the issue that's annoyed me - shit happens and they've escalated it to fix, so fair enough - it's the trial of getting any actual support whatsoever. It's near impossible if it's anything beyond "how do I restart my router?", and in my case if I'd just said balls to it and gone to another provider, I'm not convinced that my Sky account would actually have been cancelled.

We urgently need a law that states any business offering support MUST have a clear, simple option to contact a human without first having to wade through a sea of chatbot bollocks and links to all sorts of sites and dodgy phone numbers.

[Mantis]

It's only going to get worse as more companies continue to lay off their support staff in favour of adopting automated services. They're incentivised to do it even if the services are really bad because they're still getting your money whilst you're passed around in circles forever between bots.

[Raid]

I wouldn't be surprised if it were revealed that at some point, probably during the covid lockdowns because lockdowns were for the proles, the six or seven people that somehow own every single major company, all got together at a fundraiser for something we'd all hate - let's go with Vladimir Putin's Fossil Fuel Deforestation fund. At some point in the evening, one of them quipped how little he had to pay for customer support across his 7000 companies, because they'd realised that when people actually *need* support, they'll spend hours and hours of their own time trying to find it, and it meant they had to pay so few actual employees to maintain that system. The others looked at one another, and between bites of their albatross cocktails and white rhino steaks, all decided that this was a really good idea and those savings could buy them two or three of the other guests. They interrupted their individual personal assistants from peeing in bottles because they didn't have time to go to the bathroom, and arranged for them to send a memo 'round to immediately fire 90% of their support agents, rang someone to give them the go-ahead to casually dump another few thousand barrels of industrial waste into Windermere, then flew back to Epstein Island on their private Concordes. And thus, the modern consumer world was established.

And it's not like the actual customer support agents are even in a position to help. At HSBC there were so many tiny teams that had such specific fields of operation that directing a customer to the correct one was downright impossible. A customer's been scammed online? I'll direct them to the online fraud team, but oh no that's not exactly the right kind of fraud, so they put them in a queue to go to the phishing fraud team, but oh no this was more payment related and they'd been called by the scammer, so off they go into another queue to speak to the vishing team. It just ended up as a never-ending bouncing of the customer because that wasn't their specific responsibility. I *hated* coming across something that I couldn't help with when they visited the branch, because I knew just how utterly useless our support network was, and there was never any real guidance given to branch staff of how this web of teams could be navigated, and we didn't have the time to call ourselves as queue times were never lower than 10 minutes and we had two cashiers to serve an entire major town and a surrounding 30 mile radius.

I think the only organisation that will ever manage to pass legislation that actually mandates quality customer support is the European Union. They're the only ones that seem willing and able to force companies the size of Apple to change their business practices. I don't really see it happening with our current government who are simply too busy trying to hand Reform the next election to make much in the way of meaningful societal change, and there's too much money involved for the companies to do it themselves.

[Mantis]

Our government absolutely won't do it because the economy is absolutely knackered and they are desperate for any kind of investment they can get. There has been talks of bringing the big tech companies to heel but all of that was thrown out when the US bullied us into cutting it out. We're stuck between two huge trading blocs and just have to roll with the punches now.

Which is a shame because the absolutely unrestricted hellhole of social media is full of right-wing bots and AI crap which is rapidly radicalizing every dunderhead in the country.

[Stormbringer]

When I think of things to write in here...don't have the opportunity to type them up at the time...then I forget them.

[Wrathbone]

I've put an end to the Sky debacle. I never got the scheduled callback to check the issue had been resolved and arrange renewal, so I called them to see what was going on. They'd fixed it, but in terms of renewal the best they could offer was a 2 year contract at £43 p/m down from £66. I pointed out to them that last week I missed out on a £31 deal because of the issue, and also that Sky's current offer for new customers was £37 with a £100 voucher. Their response was an affronted "But we're giving a discount of £23 a month!", to which I explained that my initial sign up price had been £50 and they'd hiked it by £16 in 2 years, so it was a pretty crap deal.

5+ years ago, this sort of thing would have been an expected performative routine where you suggest you'll leave, they talk to a manager and come back with a super special deal. Those days are dead and buried. I was told that the system wouldn't allow it, and when I asked if there was someone more senior I could talk to with authority to override the system or work out a deal, I was told no. The system rules all. So I asked very bluntly if they were telling me I'd be better off going to a different provider for the same connection speed at £30 a month, and they said yes.

After I finished laughing (at some length, out of sheer disbelief at how utterly shit their sales process is), I hung up and signed up with YouFibre at £30 a month. Took a couple of minutes. What the actual fuck is Sky doing as a business?

[Animalmother]

And they wonder why piracy is at an all time high.