I’d left her with nothing but a rolled up fifty dollar bill and a saucepan with some Spanish soup made from the sherry I’d drunk and she’d watched me drink the night before. She didn’t like the sherry but she’d finished the bottle of white wine she’d borrowed from her neighbour at 2am all by herself. I was staying at her place because I had a meeting in the city in the morning and she’d insisted I not get a hotel. I’d gone to bed early but she woke me sometime past two thirty after she arrived home. She had a small bag of cocaine in one hand and two glasses in the other. My participation, she had already explained via text message from the cab, was not optional. That was the Tuesday before she flew away. I’d been reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s and had already started calling her Hollie Golightly.
Archive for March, 2010
Dear @Telstra
03.03
Dear @Telstra,
I’ve travelled a lot. Asia is one of my favourite places in the world, and even though I’m scared of volcanos, and don’t eat rice anymore, I was really looking forward to going back. Unfortunately, thanks to your inept call centres, I’ve spent more time this morning bouncing around between The Philippines and Australia than General Douglas Macarthur did in the entire Second World War. And unlike the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, I’m vowing never to return.
Things started to go wrong a week ago when I tweeted for help.
@Telstra My Mobile Broadband account shows 6.1Gig usage over the last 4 months but the bill is waaaay higher. Something is wrong 
Help!
…was my cry. To be honest I wasn’t really expecting a response, but your Twitter profile does clearly say you were there to “provide Telstra customer support” during business hours so I figured what the hell.
I would have had more luck offering @aplusk a million dollars for a night with his wife.
A week later, and with no response, I decided to use the telephone. You are a telephone company after all. I figured if I talked to you on your terms, on your turf, in your natural habitat, you’d be more likely to be more helpful. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Granted, you’ve got a lot of departments but I figured phoning the number on my bill which was listed under both ‘Billing or service enquiries’ and ‘Fault reporting 24 hours’ would have been the right place to get help with my billing enquiry which related to a fault with your system. The first person I spoke to was a robot; she was about the most intelligent person I spoke to during the course of the conversation, and at least she understood what I was saying. The second person was a human, I forget his name but I suspect that within your employee rewards system he has won accolades for being the quickest palmer-offerer in the history of palm-offing. Jesus wasn’t this quick on Palm Sunday, and he had a donkey to do the leg work.
And that’s when my customer service experience really started to turn ugly. Actually, ugly is the wrong word. Ugly Betty is ugly, but she’s hot-ugly. I’d do her and I suspect that, should he find himself in the bathtub of the Cronulla Rydges Hotel one drunken evening with Ugly Betty and a few consenting adults, the first male Telstra worker I spoke to would do her too. Ugly is a term of endearment really. My customer service experience was distorted and inaudible. The second the line was transferred to the overseas faults department it became so fuzzy I swear Angus Young started using it for a lead guitar solo. Or maybe it was thunderstruck – there has been a lot of rain in Brisbane lately.
Unfortunately, the quality of the line wasn’t the worst part of the call. Just like an after hours employee sex-romp, my Telstra experience also ended up involving rather a lot of people. Six to be precise; not counting the robot. After the first chap put me through to the faults department, they put me through to Bigpond; Bigpond put me through to online support, online support put me back through to Bigpond and then Bigpond said it wasn’t their department and said I’d have to call the Billing and service enquiries number found on my bill. By this stage I was artfully dodging ear-splitting reception crackles which were being fired like bowling balls into my cochlea, but I managed to convince the Bigpond employee in downtown Manilla that this was in fact the number I had originally dialled. They apologised and put me through to a voice which sounded vaguely Australian.
And when I say ‘vaguely Australian’, I mean the voice did sound like it was coming from an Australian call centre, but that it was so vague and distant I might as well have been talking to the ghost of General Douglas Macarthur. I asked if he might possibly call me back, handed over my mobile phone number and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Eons came and went. The Presidency of the United States changed hands a number of times and peace was declared in the Middle East, but no call came.
Dear Telstra, I’d send you another tweet for help, but according to your software I’ve now used 6.98GB of data transfers and I’m scared that another 140 characters will push me over the edge and I don’t want another $357 bill on my $89 plan. Do me a favour please, call me on my mobile phone number and sort this out. I know you have it. It is with Optus though, and I do live almost 2km from the Brisbane CBD, so I probably won’t have any reception.
Love always,
Matt