Hotel California

Hello dedicated readers. I'm back after an extended period of radio silence.

The last few weeks I have been trying to move my cell phone from "on account" to "prepay". Prepay is quite popular in New Zealand, and has nice options not available to people on account, e.g. paying a few dollars per month for unlimited calls to a designated phone number. Since I mostly call my wife, that seemed best.

When I call customer service, the telco (who shall remain nameless) answers right away. Every time I call (five times until I started using their online feedback form) I have to explain why I want to go off account. I was on hold for more than 1.5 hours over various calls. The customer service representative assured me that they would call back within 48 hours (later revised to 48 business hours, later revised to five working days). It was starting to feel like the Hotel California -- "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave". Speaking of golden oldies, the on-hold music is a raucous piece that loops for a while... then switches to Dionne Warwick:

I know I'll never love this way again,
so I keep holdin' on before the good is gone.
I know I'll never love this way again,
hold on, hold on.

I decided to use their web form. I suspected the worst and copied the text of my complaint to Notepad before hitting submit. The web form required me to create an online customer account to lodge my complaint. Sure enough, when I finally hit submit the submission failed because my credentials didn't match. Presumably they mean that I had created the ticket as an anonymous user but submitted as an authenticated user. I logged on and did it again from scratch.

When last I called, they had offered me three months free on our current phones. I thought this was because they valued me as a customer but it seems to have something to do with number portability. If I moved to their competitor I could keep the same number but they don't seem to have the software in place to let me move from account to prepay while retaining the same number. They offered me an additional two months free in the hope that they will have the software installed by the end of May. That's fine by me.

At $0 I can't complain about the cell phone plan. Cell phone plans are one of those things that are mysteriously more expensive in New Zealand than they should be. For $50 per month I get 120 minutes of calls within their network. Calls to landlines are 49 cents per minute. For the same price in Seattle I was getting 450 minutes shared between two phones with unused minutes rolling over and no distinction between calling a cell phone or a land line.