Ordinary Gweilo

Warning: even by my low standards, this is fairly boring stuff.

Like most people, I guess, I get annoyed when telemarketing people call me. Not so much because they are trying to sell me something, but rather because what they say is entirely scripted. I hate having to listen to their pathetic attempts both to be polite and to avoid telling me why they are calling. Yet the fact is that I might be interested in what they are trying to sell, in which case I am willing to spend some time on the phone, or I might not, in which case it’s a waste of everyone’s time. There’s no point trying to persuade me to buy something I don’t want, because it won’t work.

Anyway, good sales people spend a lot more time listening than they do talking. They want to understand your needs and therefore what they might be able to sell you. Clearly you can’t do that in a scripted telemarketing call.

So when someone calls me and starts reading a script, I am seconds away from putting down the phone. Hence, when a telemarketing person from my ISP called me last week I got rather upset. However, it turned out that they wanted to offer me a new lower rate for my existing broadband service.

What I eventually discovered was that this was a better offer than I had realized. When I signed up, the contract was for 18 months, which has obviously now expired. However, they carried on charging the same amount each month and so I thought nothing more about it. It turned out that what had happened was that after 18 months the unlimited broadband offer expired and I was only entitled to 100 hours a month.

I remember reading a letter in the SCMP from someone complaining about this. It is quite common for people to leave their Internet connection on permanently, and you could easily run up a very large bill in the first month (and possibly longer if you pay by Autopay and don’t check the bills they send by email). What a bunch of weasels they are!

I had managed to avoid this trap (possibly more by luck than judgement) but it was costing me an extra few dollars a month (for a service that is no use to me anymore because they have dropped the English version and which I can no longer get it to work with my PC anyway). As the new offer is for unlimited hours each month, I can now cancel that other service as well. That’s a total of over one hundred dollars a month I can now spend on more cheese!!

If there was any doubt that these people are weasels, further proof is that although they have sent me both an email and a paper copy of a confirmation letter stating that I have accepted a new deal, they don’t actually provide any information about the price or the coverage!! Their only concession is that I can review the new terms on their website, but only after they come into effect next month! What if there was some misunderstanding about what was agreed in the brief phone call?

In fact, even when I called them it was hard work to get them to confirm the details – at first they only seemed to have a record of my orginal plan, but eventually they found the new agreement.

Then I got a nonsense letter from them warning that under no circumstances should I attempt to set up VoIP using their broadband service. It’s very complicated, and I might inadvertently break something (which is normally their job). Moreover, if I called the emergency services using my new VoIP phone, they wouldn’t know where I was calling from (unless, I suppose, I told them, which I think I would).

Weasel alert!

(Simon has more on this)