Sorry this is a bit of a long one...

On Saturday we headed into town to run a few errands amongst which was to look at the mobile phone I'd recently set my heart on getting (I don't fall for them often but when I do I fall hard!). After unsuccessfully completing any of the other errands we started to hunt for said phone. First stop t-mobile, lovely girl, politely told me that they'd only be stocking the phone in their top 50 stores of which ours wasn't one of them. Ok, didn't bode well but, as I really didn't think anywhere would have it, not a problem. Second stop the outside O2 shop (yes we have more than one), they, it seems, didn't see me as a potential customer as they couldn't be bothered to look away from their computer screens to help me out. Fine, onwards and upwards, perhaps we should go back to looking for some advent calendars. Which we did, but didn't find any of them either!
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Next, the O2 shop inside, snazzier than outside, they have a settee and everything! We walked in, waited for the assistant and then asked "I don't suppose you have a HTC HD2 in stock for us to look at?". Now I've been following this phone for well over a month, watching the launch date get moved once a week, reading the complaints as people can't get hold of them, willing it to be on the O2 site to no avail, so you can imagine my surprise when he turned around and said "yes, I'll just pop and get one for you". Two minutes later he came out of the stock room with a brand new box in his hand, five minutes later and a conversation with the manager he managed to get the back off to put the battery in and there I was playing with it

So next came the dilemma, I'd only come in to have a look at it, knowing that it wouldn't be in stock and now I had it in my hand. Do I buy it? We went through the debate of which contract I could get it on, how much was it (How Much?!?) Could I afford that, if I put it off would I be able to get one... Eventually it was decided that yes I could afford it, yes I could be stubborn and get it on the contract I wanted and yes I would get it that day. Now came the fun part…

We first had an issue because my current contract was in my maiden name and all of my bank cards are now in my married name. Guess who didn’t think to walk around with her marriage certificate. Two options, send said marriage certificate off to O2 and order phone online or get the guy to put this phone on hold and come back the following day with the certificate. As I knew ordering by phone was going to be a nightmare I went with option two. After arriving back home we decided we would head back to town after lunch, get it over and done with on the Saturday rather than string it out all weekend. So suitably filled with bacon sandwiches we headed back into a police infested town centre (I choose the weekend football was at home). We went back to the shop, found the guy we’d dealt with in the morning and started the lengthy procedure of upgrading to a different account and buying the phone. This, in itself, took longer than it should as the newbie sales assistant referred constantly to his manager (not that I’m complaining about this, we all have to learn somewhere). As he was processing the phone towards the end of the process I noticed a slight anomaly in the bill he’d produced which we queried with the boss in a “Just out of interest, I’m not really paying 54 million pound a month for the contract am I?” kind of way, to which the boss replied with a no, explaining that the sales assistant had made a slight mistake when putting the contract through (he selected the phone as an option when he was working on the sim card part rather than the o2->simo option – which is fairness wasn’t obvious!) but just to make sure he’d just give HQ a ring and check. Which he did and they confirmed that no it was all ok, he just needed to put a note on the account, which he did. Sorted. I walked out of the shop with my new phone and sim only contract. A very happy bunny

We went home, I plugged the phone in and left it to charge, semi-patiently until, an hour or so later, Dan received a phone call from my mother. The O2 shop had rung about a mistake with my bill (they hadn't noticed I'd changed my home numner...), I was going to be charged 54 million pound at the end of the month, could I pop into the shop and sort it out! Uh, huh. Ok. Off back into town we trotted.

Needless to say, when we arrived back at the shop, the manager was very apologetic! We were handed over to one of his colleagues (he had to go, a doctors appointment, stress related he joked!) who began the even lengthier process of voiding the contract and starting again. Now you see this isn’t as easy as it seems. First he had to cancel everything, even the phone because it was bought as part of the “contract”. He then had to work out if we could re-buy the phone as technically it had already been sold – apparently there are technicalities which could make that illegal?! He then had to ring up HQ to let him sign me up for the contract again otherwise flags are raised that the shop is diddling the system. The phone call caused him to speak to three separate people, the first passed him onto a different department, the second said they had to check on something and then hung the phone up and finally the third confirmed that everything was cancelled and he could now put me onto the new, new contract. For each person he spoke to he had to give the exact amount of the contract to the person at the other end of the phone, have a bit of a giggle about it and confirm that yes it really was happening. At one point he even asked if I was sure I wouldn’t be able to afford it… It’s slightly satisfying that it’s not just the customers that have difficulties with telesales! Half an hour or so later, some rangling with the computer system to let me re-purchase the phone and I finally had a phone and contract at the correct price.

We learnt a lot during this episode and despite the problems I am so glad I did the purchase via the shop rather than online, imagining if I’d had to sort out the mess myself! Something to think about, had the bill gone to the bank and for some insane reason they’d paid (blowing my overdraft slightly!) O2s policy is to credit the overpayment onto the next bill… free upgrades and phones for life! Also, the only reason the mistake had been picked up was because the original guy at HQ had been joking about the phone call he'd had from the shop during his lunch hour and his supervisor had overheard and realised that something was wrong. Nothing in the system, including error checking by the computers, had flagged that a 54 million pound bill might not be quite right! At least the amount included VAT though so no nasty surprises later on…