Moving House

I’m not actually putting house moves into the Shitopedia. In fact, seeing new places and having a change of scenery can be an inspiring thing to do and enrich the soul. What I do have a problem with, is the several months of being “on hold” that goes with it. A certain British telecommunications company seemed to have a lot of trouble with the concept of moving house. At one point I considered whether I was their first customer to venture the idea. Maybe other users of telephones and broadband prefer being manacled to their homes for the security it gives them. Why see the world when you can spend £60 a month chatting to your gas provider or playing bingo online?

The best bit was when the woman on the telephone sighed audibly at the suggestion we shouldn’t have to pay for a service we don’t receive and that the contract we signed might work both ways.

Likewise the banks shuffled nervously like birds on a wobbly telephone line. Move house? Are you on the run? Change your address? Well, fill in this form and then we’ll ignore it and then you’ll have to try again on telephone banking.

In all, the time I had spent listening to “press one”, badly recorded African drumming and “if you’re still waiting you can try our website” added up to about twenty hours. No wonder they automate the systems for efficiency, they’re getting their customers to do all the hard work.

I’ve moved a couple of times this year for various reasons and that has seriously screwed up the system. I now have three addresses for the postman to choose from and more instructions for the companies to ignore. I took an afternoon off to go into a bank and set up some payments, change the address, that sort of thing. I naively believed that if I was watching, maybe the woman on the other side of the glass would at least try not to mess it up. I also tried this method because it had to be done quickly.

Five days later someone rang me up and said that nothing had been done because a signature wasn’t quite right. I had taken my passport, driver’s licence and bank card with me in case identity was a porblem but was assured that none of it would be needed. Over-prepared little me. I was told on the phone that part of the problem was that I hadn’t responded to correspondence sent to my address. The address that I had told them, that very same afternoon, that I was moving out of shortly.

I like moving around, but it seems that banks, government agencies and communications companies are intent on penalising anyone who dares complicate their little tick-boxes by mislaying information, inputting it wrong or being rude to people who dare to suggest that there could be a more customer-friendly means of providing a service. That is, if we ever get through the telephone options phase.

I spent so long going through the options and customer information messages on a council tax line that my mobile ran out of credit and I eventually walked into the council offices in order to try and pay them. The bonus was that paper forms have to be processed and would take around a month to get on the system. Bring it on – make them do the work for you.

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