It has been a while since we
had the luxury of multi-channel television due to Virgin Media being a huge
pile of shit with no regard for customers and a startling inability to
understand specific instructions. I refused to set up a direct debit to pay the
bill, as I don’t trust the direct debit system and I don’t trust Virgin Media
to not fuck things up. When I left my wife I briefly (not briefly enough)
worked in a call centre for BT and found out about how the customer is royally
conned by the direct debit billing system. They say that you are rewarded with
a discount if you pay in this way, but the reality is that you are in fact
being punished if you don’t. There was a court case in Nottingham a few years
ago involving an old man who paid his bill by post but deducted the fine for
not paying by direct debit, and BT (who are the most unfeeling, don’t-give-a-shit-about-the-customers-or-staff,
corrupt bunch of shit eating fucking cunts imaginable) sued him for those
payments stating that he wasn’t paying the full bill. He was paying exactly the
right bill, but for some reason he lost the court case and had to pay up. I
suspect that the judge left the courtroom with a brown envelope in his jacket
pocket thanks to BT, and that is only my opinion so I am not committing libel. For
the record, the unfeeling shit eating fucking cunts bit isn’t libellous either
because it is true.
Virgin Media used to send us
the bill in the middle of the month and then cut off our service almost immediately.
Every single time we told them that we would pay them at the end of the month,
which we did and then had to wait up to twenty four hours to be reconnected. If
it wasn’t for the WiFi in the student accommodation a few doors down, then I
would have been stuck for a way to send the American show over. Eventually we
both decided that we had had enough of this slapdash service and I phoned them
(once we were reconnected) and asked the operative to put a note in the system
saying that we regularly pay at the end of the month and that there is no need
to cut us off mid-month. I also said that if it happened one more time then our
contract would be void and that we would owe nothing. They ignored it
obviously.
They provided us
(occasionally) with television, Internet, and telephone for a monthly fee, but
we were actually only paying for half a month. I am waiting for the first
reminder to come in so that I can do a full breakdown of the times they cut us
off and see how much we really owe them. Technically speaking, they owe us for
the last two weeks of every month which means that if we don’t pay our last
bill then we are actually massively in credit. We only didn’t pay our last bill
but they owe us twenty five pound a month for the best part of the last year.
Every letter I receive from them will be politely replied to with these facts
stated, as they have fucked with the wrong person this time as I cannot abide
bad service and make it my business to complain every time until something is
done.
Now we have Sky and we are
back to watching back-to-back episodes of Friends despite
having the complete box set in our house, just like everyone else.
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