A culture revolving around you

…no, not a cheesy new personal mantra, but a quote from the website of O2. Ironic, in a non-Morissette stylee.

Today I parted company with my Blackberry and my temper.  Now, I admit that I’m a teensy bit attached to my Crackberry – heaven forbid I should spend time doing something productive when I could be updating my Facebook status. So you can imagine the horror when the keyboard started to generate random characters…there was a danger of improving the quality of my Facebook posts.

I went along to the O2 store and can thoroughly recommend the experience as a way of seeing large parts of your weekend and faith in the human race destroyed.

The first assistant told me (in her best teenage to old/post pubescent person manner) that my keyboard was malfunctioning because my time zone was set to central Europe – her explanation being that people in Holland speak Danish and that might have an impact on the language (?!). Understandably, I asked to speak to a supervisor.

The supervisor offered me a low grade loan phone while my Blackberry was being investigated, but said I could not be provided with a replacement with equivalent functionality….I would however continue to be charged the premium rate for Blackberry services.

After insisting on speaking to someone who had reached puberty (I may have refrained from phrasing it that way), the regional on-call manager grudgingly offered a temporary reduction in tariff as what he termed a ‘goodwill’ gesture. I think he may use a different dictionary to me…but in the spirit of being down with the kids, I would like to call him a condescending idiot as a ‘goodwill’ gesture.

An increasingly intimidating teenager #2 informed me that I was being condescending . Bless. Hard to remain polite at the prospect of Crackberry withdrawal and in the face of being asked three times for the same personal details that the company already holds as part of my customer record (the details that the shop has no problem accessing when I’m there to upgrade or buy anything).

End result? I am the proud temporary custodian of a Nokia that might generously be described as retro and less generously as antique. Said Nokia does not come with an instruction booklet so its presence in my life is likely to be largely decorative rather than functional. I invested in a box of anti-bacterial wipes on the way home.

A formal written complaint is being submitted – the nice man on the ‘helpline’ admitted he had no idea of the name of the CEO of the company (thank goodness for Google) and that that here were ‘problems’ with email contact. O2 – communication at its best.