Longer than we would like

Tosser

I’ve just had the misfortune of phoning Virgin Media. Actually technically it was NTL Telewest business, but it’s all the same thing now, leasing the name from that ginger bearded attention seeker.

After all my rants and raves about how I hate this company, I guess it makes me a hypocrite for having Virgin Media at work and even more surprisingly it was me that decided on it. (At the time, ADSL wasn’t available.)

I was on hold for the customary 25 minutes, listening to shocking elevator tunes that sounded like a jazz fusion of the Teletubbies theme. I guess if they played anything that you knew you would get a BPI warning letter for “illegally downloading”  into your ear whilst on hold.

Every minute or so the music stops and you think a person is about to speak, but it’s just the automated message saying, “It’s taking longer than we would like to take your call, we know you are waiting”. After the third time of hearing that I had already stabbed my eyes out with a biro.

But I wont hold all this against the people on the other end, they were actually quite helpful and very pleasant – once I’d got through to a human.

The reason I phoned them was because they had been billing us £140 per month + VAT for a slow pipe. As anyone that’s dealt with utilities or telecoms companies before knows, when the prices come down for new customers they don’t for old ones – unless you phone them up and get them to change your contract.

I’d never been in receipt of the invoices to this place but once I had seen one I was disappointed to see that for the past 4 or 5 years we’ve paid them about £5000 too much. But they never told us. I did get a slight discount on my new contract with them which slashed the cost by £100 per month, but that’s nothing to match the colossal amount we’d been mindlessly handing over to Branson.

Yes, we’re a bunch of idiots for not chasing this up much sooner but I reckon it’s time there was some responsibility placed upon services companies to ensure their customers are not being ripped off in this way. I know gas and electric companies do it but it’s easier to switch between them than it is between cable and analog phone line.