My future is not Orange!

One of the things I always pull away from doing in life away from work is announcing, or even mentioning, that I edit the Birmingham Mail.

I'm sure you can understand why. We all know people who feel they have a half-important job who let it slip into almost every conversation that they feel they are rather important.

But after three months of telephone tussle with Orange, my internet provider, I broke my very own rule and told them who I was and what I would now do as a result of their appalling service.

Full details of this saga will be in the Birmingham Mail soon as our consumer editor Catherine Hendrick is hunting the company down over the way it has performed in my domestic case.

But, in summary, a long-standing internet connection from home started to fail back in January. I phoned the Orange helpline, quickly finding out it was a premium-charged line to India.

Fair enough... if it had worked. But it didn't. Over three months, the internet connection got worse and worse, eventually chucking us off within minutes of connecting every day. And each time I called the premium rate line, the Bombay-based operators toook me through the same, almost painful, scripted Q&A.

A word here about the operators themselves. Perfectly polite and pleasant. So long were some of the conversations that during the technology-related pauses we exchanged info about weather, time zones and shift times. Orange can at least be proud that they employ well-spoken, well-meaning operatives.

But unfortunately for those operatives, and more unfortunately for Orange, the Q&A scripts never changed despite each failure. And the system employed meant I had to phone them each time at a rate that soon meant I'd calculated £100+ in failed calls.

At this point I got quite annoyed, and spoke to supervisor after supervisor, trying to get someone at Orange to realise that surely in this case the consumer was being treated unfairly and deserved them to phone me at their cost, at the very least. Plus a partial rebate of the failed phone bill... and what about the £15 rent paid each month for a service that didn't work?

Their response? Phone this number....etc. At this point, I admit, I told whoever was on the phone who I was in terms of working role, ie: editor of one of the biggest evening papers in Britain. And I informed them that I would be commissioning an investigation into the way I felt Orange was ripping customers like me off.

Since then I have switched to another service, one run by O2, one that currently does NOT use a premium rate service and, to date, I have enjoyed total connectivity.

Orange, meanwhile, are now being held up against the wall for what I feel is their negligent consumer service, and the results will soon be published under our Watchdog series in the Birmingham Mail.

Watch this space...