yonmei

yonmei @ 11:18 pm: I WIN!
The last time I tried to recredit my Vodafone Pay As You Go account, I was told my card had expired.

I checked with my bank, and discovered to my unsurprise that Vodafone had got it wrong; my card was still perfectly valid.

So I tried to check with Vodafone what the problem was. I found that Vodafone had no means to let me do that:

1. I could keep going back and forth through the automated menus for free for as long as I could bear it, but nothing there would help. (I could have deleted the card and added it again, but I wanted to know why Vodafone had suddenly decided it was invalid.)

2. I could not talk to anyone at Vodafone unless I called a fee-paying line: and I had no credit on my phone with which to do that. (Yes, I could have used another phone, but in an odd concatenation of circumstances, my landline had been working badly too, and I hate doing this kind of thing from my work phone. Besides, I would truly resent having to pay lots in order to get Vodafone to explain why/how they had screwed up my debit card.)

3. I could e-mail Vodafone! This sounded like an excellent idea initially. I wrote a fairly detailed e-mail, adding my name, address, etc, and asking for an explanation why my card was declared expired when it had two years to go. But, Vodafone does not actually have anyone to read the support e-mails sent: they have a very good, very flexible software system which creates form e-mails responsively to keywords in the e-mails sent. The first one actually fooled me into thinking I might get to communicate with a real person: it was signed Abhay Chavan, and though it was clearly a form e-mail, it looked like the kind that is set up to be briskly sent off to resolve what might be the problem. ... except then I got an identical e-mail in response to my reply, this one signed Vivek Patil. Why they bother with the different names I don't know: I didn't get any reply from the e-mail I sent them asking why they don't bother to have anyone read the customer support e-mails, either.

4. I finally discovered that the one sure way of getting to talk to someone was to call the cancelation number. Which by this time was all I wanted to do. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) when I spoke to the man who had the misfortunate of getting my call, and he asked me "Why do you want to leave Vodafone?" my hissed response "A complete absence of customer service!" got me put on hold for three minutes and then an extremely prompt and polite PAC code for me to transfer my number (the same one I've had since 2001) from Vodafone to Orange.

So that was the end of Vodafone for me. Well, at least until next time. I mean, all phone companies are garbage. But oh, the joy of PAYGO: to be able to just decide "screw you!" and go. (I transferred all my contacts across on Sunday in an Orange shop, before I rang Orange to port my number.)

And then I had a problem. I got a Nokia 1600 with a Vodafone SIM card last year in the aftermath of the 3 thing. And the Nokia turned out to be locked to Vodafone only: which I found when I inserted my Orange SIM card and got "SIM CARD NOT VALID".

But, solo put me on to a site called www.moneysavingexpert.com, and there was a subsection for unlocking mobile phones for free, so I tried a couple of the websites from there (unlock.nokiafree.org and www.unlockitfree.com) and found the second one had the clearer explanation so I went with the number one code from that website...
...and WHEE. It worked. My phone was unlocked. My Orange SIM card works.

I am wizard of my own phone. :-D