From the mind of Hamish

My views on news, current events, sports and the general goings on in my life.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Why do companies make it so hard? Recently I've been forced to change ISPs and have had great trouble cancelling my old account.

A few months ago I got a call from my ISP asking me to call them, the message sounded like they were trying to sell me something so I gave it a fairly low priority. Suddenly my internet connection stops working! I call them, they tell me they disabled it so that I would call them because the government owned telco has cancelled the agreement they had in regard to broadband internet. I can no longer get broadband from them and use a different ISP. OK, I say, I'll stay with you guys, where do I sign? Apparently because I live within 100m of one of their fibre optic cables they legally cannot provide me service! What??

So I have to find a new ISP. That's no problem, I find a new one, go through the sign up process and everything works fine. I then send an email to accounts@myoldisp.com telling them to cancel my account. During this period I was unable to access my usual email so I used my work account but gave them all the details they would need. Or so I thought. After hearing nothing and going away on holiday I come back to find my bank account has been direct debitted by my old ISP. So now I ring the bank and cancel the direct debit authority.

Next I call my old ISP and tell them I want to cancel my account. I'm told I have to send an email advising them of this, when I tell them I already have they say it has to come from my ISP mail account. I own 2 domain names and never use my ISP mail but if that's the hoop I've gotta jump through, so be it. Now of course, their SMTP server doesn't accept connections from outside their network, so I have to come up with another way. I figure, I'll relay it off my mail server, so I set the from address to my ISP mail account, then change the reply-to header to my email address.

A day later I get an email telling me they cannot close my account because the email didn't come from my ISP mail account so they cannot verify my identity. Great, so this time I log into their webmail and send them a rather nasty email telling them to close my account and that I will never deal with them ever again. For some reason this illicits a very defensive responce. "We're sorry you find our account closure procedure arduous but we require an email from an authorised email address to verify your identity." WHAT? Talking to me on the phone isn't good enough? But you're willing to trust the From: header in an email, good thing that can't be spoofed.

Where has customer service gone? Why do I have to do all the hard work in dealing with these companies? It should be a simple phone call with a couple of security questions asked, or an email that contains all the relevant information such as account name, password, account number. Not rely on something spammers have been exploiting since forever! There are some companies who are a pleasure to deal with, Vodafone comes to mind. I tell them my phone number, supply a pin and then the person on the other end of the phone is extremely helpful. But not my old ISP, they just make things too damn hard.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Not sure if I should be posting this in this blog or my other blog, Referee's Corner. Since I haven't been running for ages, over 3 weeks, I decided to go back to aquacise. Man was it hard work! The format has changed a little bit and we did all kinds of new moves but it was great fun. Even tho I think I inhaled half the pool. It's a great way to get fit, altho I'm going to get back into running fairly soon, this is just a stop gap. Well, that and I have a consession card with about 7 more visits left on it. Might go running on Saturday.

I really enjoy running in some weird kind of way, plus I've lost quite a bit of weight running. I've gotten my wife to start running too, she's looking great! Now I just need to catch up with her, altho I've always had a lot move weight to lose than her.