Sophie Heawood: how hard can it be to cancel a mobile phone or satellite TV contract?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/25/mobile-phone-tv-contract-cancel

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People say this country lacks stamina, that we have become a nation of quitters, but they clearly haven’t met Rachael, a woman employed by Sky TV to ensure its customers get stuck inside the company for ever. A story caught my eye this week about a man called Gavin Hackwood, a 36-year-old father of two from South Wales, who spent 96 minutes in an online live chat with Rachael, trying to terminate his contract. A mere 3,800 words of questions and answers later, in which he pleaded just to cancel his contract, and she repeatedly said, “At the end of the day, Gavin” before asking him how much he liked watching Formula One and where he was planning to keep his multiscreen box, they had got nowhere.

Finally, after an hour and a half, she broke it to him that, as he had recently cancelled the Sky Movies part of his deal, he couldn’t cancel the whole thing as well. Two cancellations can’t happen at the same time, you see, because cancellations are real live baby animals that must suck milk from one breast, and definitely not intangible concepts actioned by pressing a button on a screen and watching a smaller or larger amount of nothingness slip into the void that is the 21st century. And so it is that modern companies follow the techniques of The Prisoner, trying to keep us all trapped in The Village for ever. HELP.

I’ve been trying to leave my mobile phone company for months. Some days I get a surge of energy and think, yes! Today is the day I will become clean and new! I can embrace dynamic change! I even got as far as browsing another phone company’s website, and typing my number into their call-back facility box. A very enthusiastic young woman did indeed call me back, and then tell me at length about how there would be two bills the first month I joined, because of something and another thing and meteors and galaxies and fractals and... I don’t know what the rest of the words were.

It went on and on, this thing about overlap notices, until the point where my ears had glazed over and I noticed a really important work email had just popped up on my screen. I made my apologies and said I had to go. Some minutes later, I was still apologising for having to go. “But why did you ask us to ring you?” she wanted to know. It was a reasonable question, from a reasonable company. And I will probably never speak to them again.

So I started trying to clean up my email inbox instead, to unsubscribe from the hundreds of mailing lists to which I have inadvertently signed up over the years. My favourites are the ones that, rather than just letting you go with a small passive-aggressive sadface, give you a link to unsubscribe, then lure you to a website where you have to fill in your details again, only to scroll you through some options on the precise nature of your unsubscription, before they send you an email to let you know they’re processing your request for them not to email you any more. Then they send you another email to tell you they’ve now actually processed your request for them never to email you again. So much for all that healthy capitalist competition we’ve been told about, and the consumer’s right to pick and choose. These companies make limpets look like commitment-phobic playboys. It would be easier to end a long-term relationship with a cult member who also has a Saint Bernard dog.

Obviously, working for these companies is no picnic either, which is why I used to make time for a nice chat. These days, I have simply given up on giving these companies up. I will die with the television package I hardly watch, and the landline phone whose number I don’t even know. But back in more energetic times, I even made an effort to memorise the name of the person on the other end of the phone.

This once backfired on me when a friendly voice rang me back from the electric firm. “Oh, yes, hello!” I said. “We were talking earlier. It’s Simon, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t. “My name is Mohammed,” said the nice man. There was then a brief pause. “I have been called many, many things in my life,” he added, “but never Simon.”