It’s not every day that big companies say they’re very sorry, but yesterday one of them did, and here’s why…
For most of this year we’ve been waiting to move into the house we bought way back in December 2010. We moved into a rented house in Derby until the move was finalised. We’ve always had our phone & Internet through Virgin Media, but as they were a bit crap at getting services to our rented house we decided to switch to Orange. I’ve had a mobile account with them for years and I’ve never had a problem. So after a couple of weeks our new Orange phone & Internet was activated & we were good to go. We then (as I’m sure most of you are well aware of by now) finally got our moving house date through. Friday 15th April & we’d be moving into our new house up in north Derbyshire, I therefore notified Orange of our impending move…
‘There’s already an active line in the house, so you’ll have to call us again on the day of move. We’ll then set your phone & broadband up for you,’ said Mr Orange.
The events (or rather non-events) of Friday 15th April are well documented on here, so I’ll simply say that just after lunchtime on the Friday I called Orange to move our services from the rented house over to the new house. And when our move was cancelled at 5.30PM I called Orange again to stop the move. Alas it was too late; our services had already been switched off, but Orange very kindly said they’d switch them back on again…
‘It may take up to 3 days for your services to come back,‘ said Mrs Orange.
‘We’ll probably be moved out & into the new house by then!!!‘ said an exasperated yours truly.
On Monday 18th we moved into our new house 🙂 I therefore gave Orange another call to move our services into the new house…
‘That’s all sorted for you now and in a few days your phone-line will be live. Your broadband should follow anywhere up to 10 days after that,‘ said a rather jolly Miss Orange.
‘Have we got a new telephone number?‘
‘Yes…‘ which Miss Orange gave to me. Strangely she gave me a number with a Derby area code, even though I was pretty sure we’d moved to another area???
A few days later as we ploughed our way through 100’s of boxes, we found the phones & the broadband router. These were plugged in and sure enough we had phone & Internet 🙂 But our phone-number wasn’t the one that the jolly Miss Orange had given me??? Oh well we thought; we’ve got our phone & broadband so who cares if she’s given us the wrong number… That was about 3 weeks ago. On Tuesday evening our phone & broadband went POP & disappeared 🙁
It’s taken over an hour on the phone to Mr, Mrs & a not so jolly Miss Orange to finally get this sorted and this is basically what has happened…
The people we bought our new house off, failed to cancel their Orange phone & broadband. Which is why our phone & Internet worked when we plugged them in. They’ve clearly canceled it now, which is why it disappeared!!!
When I asked Orange to move our services from our rented house in Derby to our new house in north Derbyshire, they sort of did this. Orange, for some insane reason, moved our phone & broadband out of our rented Derby house & installed it back in our rented Derby house a few days later!!! Complete with a new bloody phone number!!!
Mrs Orange told me that Mr Orange was very very sorry indeed and that Mr Orange would give me a call to talk about some kind of compensation…
And just as I’m finishing to type this post a very charming Mr Orange has just called. Lovely man, very apologetic and they’ve given me some free phone & broadband rental 🙂 I can cope with big companies a lot better if they openly admit to their mistakes & deal with their customers as well as Orange have always done with me. So even though we may remain Internet-less for a few more days, I’m still really impressed with Orange…
