Yesterday was a momentous occasion: it was the day I received my first UK bank statement, and was therefore able to do my bit to consummate England’s national love affair with the utility bill. I mean, seriously: this is a country where you can walk into a shop to get a mobile phone or an ID card and say, “I have in this hand a fistful of credit cards and in this hand, a pristine Canadian passport,” and have the clerk sniff and say, “I’m sorry sir, but without a gas bill, we simply won’t be able to help you” (when I went to Citibank with the details of my Citibank US and Citibank Canada accounts, I was told to come back with a FedExed note from my boss attesting to my address, because of the “know your customer” rules — apparently, an original signature on letterhead confers a depth of knowledge that mere years-long in-house financial records can’t convey).
Yesterday was the day I hied myself off to the Tottenham Court Road to go shopping for a mobile phone. I knew exactly what I wanted: a Sony-Ericsson P900 with the O2 75 plan, which gets me 1000 minutes and several texts for only two or three times what comparable service would cost in the US (English mobile phones are very feature-rich, come with lovely high-speed data service, and cost so much to use that it’s hard to believe that there’s really anyone using the advanced features — not at £4 a megabyte!).
The man in the Carphone Warehouse gave me the hookup, set up my account, called their credit department, and told me I’d have to pay a £150 deposit to go a-roaming in Europe. This is steep, but I can hack it. I gave him the nod, and then he passed me the contract to sign and went off to get my new phone. That’s when he discovered that he’d run right out of P900s. I walked the length of the Tottenham Court Road strip and couldn’t locate a P900 (or, indeed any phone with more than 12 buttons) for love or money.
But eventually, my luck changed. An Orange store staffed with friendly and knowledgeable clerks had P900s in stock and they were happy to take my money. We went through the signup rigamarole again — took hours — and then they called it in.
No dice. All of Orange’s account sign-up computers were down. I went away and came back, but the computers were still down. The clerk confided that this happened a lot to Orange’s overtaxed billing computers. I thought that it was a little weird that I was about to trust this company with my telephony when they couldn’t even manage the IT necessary to reliably sign up a new customer, but shrug, they had the phone and I needed it, and besides, they’d match O2’s rates for me. They sent me away and asked me to return the next day.
It was a waste of time.
I came back today, and after an hour more of hemming and hawing, this is what transpired: Orange would give me a phone with e £75 deposit, but I would have to wait 90 days before I’d be allowed to roam with the phone. I pointed out that I travelled two or three weeks out of every month, and this would render this (very expensive) phone very useless to me. I asked to speak to a supervisor. No dice. I offered to leave the same deposit I’d been asked for at O2. Even fewer than no dice — “We don’t know who you are, we can’t give you roaming.” I offered a bigger deposit. I offered to show the (enormous, promptly paid) cellular bills from my last year with Nextel. The deed to my condo in Toronto. The letter of reference from Yale. The Wired masthead. My US credit-report.
A waste of time.
It’s the rules, they said. And please stop asking to speak to the credit department: they’re not “customer-facing” and they’re getting annoyed. You’re annoying them.
Right, I thought, I’ll call the press-relations department. I spoke to them at length — flatteringly enough, they’d heard of me. So, what’s the problem, I asked. Well, we can’t do this because it’s too risky to extend roaming to someone with no credit. I have credit. And it’s what everyone does. Not O2. But you could ring up big bills with our roaming partners and stick us with them. I could call Tokyo and leave the phone off the hook for 24h without leaving England’s shores and rack up just as big a liability for you..
At the end of the day, it came to this: These are our rules. We will stick to them. We will not make exceptions to them. We will hug them to our bosom beyond any kind of rationality or reason.
I am such a goddamned telephone junkie. I’m no Joi Ito with his $3,500 GPRS bills, but I’ve been spending $200 or $300 on cellular telephone damned near every month since 1992. I am every mobile carrier’s dream. Any rational carrier would jump at my business.
But Orange isn’t rational. It doesn’t have a business plan, it has a bunch of superstitions to which it rigidly hews regardless of circumstance — the media person I was speaking to reported that she’d spoken to their head of customer care, who wouldn’t budge; this intransigence goes right to the top.
So Orange has lost my business, and to hell with them. As soon as O2 gets some P900s in stock, I’ll gladly give them the 150 quid and get signed up and running.
And I think I’ve figured out why the Orange shop is the only place in town with any phones in stock: they make life so miserable for anyone who tries to buy one that you’d have to be flat-out desperate to take one off their hands.