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You Never Quite Know Who You Are Talking To

Tony Horne strikes up an unexpected conversation while ranting at Vodafone.

By Tony Horne

16 Sep 2011, 16:00

‘£595, ‘ I shouted. ‘You can fuck right off.’

I logged on to my Internet banking for something else, and discovered the bad news. My Vodafone bill – and I resent spelling fone with a f not a ph – was no longer the £30 I normally pay, it was six bloody hundred quid. Suddenly, when you are in these moments, everything else stops. The kids’ breakfasts are a secondary irrelevance; anger is the order of the day. We’ve all been there. There then follows an inevitable sequence of events, normally beginning with a security check you can’t clear, followed by an operator you can’t understand; then finally a muppet who can’t deviate from the script. Then the dreaded, “I’ll just transfer you” which of course only means one thing. You’re going to get cut off.

I admit – I had been chatting a bit last month. I had just finished eighteen years of breakfast shows on the radio and friends, gossips masquerading as friends, and journalists clearly disguised as both, wanted to know why. It won’t be the same this month, of course, because those people don’t call anymore! But a bill that is twenty times my norm was clearly a farce.

Had I been hacked? That’s illegal, if you’ve not been following.  Was I that drunk at my 40th birthday weekend that I rang the world and his wife? Possibly. Was I so bitter at no longer having a radio platform to spout my shit, I did it on the phone? No, it’s been so refreshing to see life as something more than “show material”. I demanded a call back. Get me the head of Vodafone immediately!

Some hours later, a nice man from Belfast called David rang me. I made the point that whenever I am abroad they always tell me if I am close to over-roaming. They always rang me and made me better deals too. In fact, they had been consistently excellent. I didn’t know I had gone over, and equally what kind of customer service was that to allow you not just to go slightly over but to go crashing into the hundreds? Surely, they had a duty of care to be consistent with their previously excellent behaviour to me and tell me. Say what you want about those bastard bankers, when I used to go a penny overdrawn they at least had the decency to send me a letter and tell me, even though the correspondence itself cost me £12. Of course, I would write back and tell them that my letter was going to cost them £13 and the game would begin, but that’s not the point. Those bankers cared!!!

Not Maria, at Vodafone, she had the arrogance to tell me that it was my job to keep an eye on my spends. How dare she? I am a very busy man, you know.
‘I’m leaving you if you don’t refund,’ I jilted her at the altar of telecommunications.
Well, thank goodness for David.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he purred in Irish, ‘I’m going to refund that money. You are a heavy user, and I hear what you are saying.’
This was the Vodafone I was accustomed to, much as I dislike the heavy user phrase! After all, if they can afford to splash themselves all over Lewis Hamilton, they don’t need to mess with a few hundred quid here or there.
‘What’s your email?’ he asked.
‘Books at Tony Horne Books Dot Com,’ I replied.
‘Oh what kind of books do you write?’
Suddenly we had a relationship. I so nearly gave him my other email address.
‘I wrote Tango 190, about the blinded policeman. You might have seen it.’
I often say this very loudly! Every conversation is a sale.
‘Oh, I’ve written a book, you know. About Pol Pot. It took me about eight years to write, it’s a labour of love,’ he confessed.
‘Is it any good?’ I quizzed.
‘I think so.’
Crikey, I could get shares at this rate, let alone a refund.
‘Send it to me in confidence, and I will send it to someone who might ask somebody to have somebody look at it. But I think I know someone who might know someone who might want to publish that.’
I was at my most eloquent.

Little did either of us know that this rage of mine would end here, and to David, I must have been just another angry caller to ring back, arguing the toss about whatever. But I know that he came off the phone smiling, thinking he had a shot at it, and I hung up too, thinking justice was done. I didn’t have time to ask him the key question, though. If you’ve spent eight years of your life writing a book on Pol Pot, what the hell are you doing working in a call centre for Vodafone complaints?