I won't name the firm just yet but I've been in a bit of an argument over the phone about how a company deals with its customers.
I originally sent them a very polite e-mail, going into full details about how the system works, or, more importantly, how I WANT it to work on my Mac computer. I even tried to inject a modicum of comedy by adding at the end that if they sent me £200 towards a Windows laptop, I'd be delighted to buy one so that I could use their updated system a lot easier. I also said that I was a computer dork so it was more than possible that I was doing it wrong but the jist of my argument was that I wanted, if possible, to go back to the system that was in use before their update because that actually worked.
After hitting the "Send" button, it was less than 10 minutes before the phone rang. Mrs Stevie picked up the phone and after a few seconds with her face screwed up she said, "You'll need to slow down, Love. I can't understand what you are saying." Another few minutes passed by and she gave the phone to me just saying, "It's Paypal."
So I take the phone off her and say,
"Hi, yes, this is Fred Bloggs." (Not my real name.) The reason that my wife couldn't understand him was that he was from somewhere up on the North East coast, hence the title.
He says, "Can I just check your date of birth" ......... and we then went through a mass of security details during which I tried to log into my Paypal page (Not mentioning any numbers over the phone). I was unable to log in successfully 'cos the site was down.
Another thing that he said that got up my nose was that he was calling me because of the e-mail that I had sent. He must have said that 6 or more times. So then I asked him to read the last two lines of the e-mail, that's the bit about going back to before the update.
He said, "Well we'd like to try this first and tried to get my Mac working alongside his system.
Eventually he gave up and said, "Why don't I just delete the update to your Mac and that should take you back to the old system?
I replied, "Excellent idea. Why didn't I think of that?"
As luck would have it, I had just bought an Audio book for £1.99 and it worked perfectly.
