Little People Take On Meteor
May 26, 2004
You might want to read the previous entry "Brightspark 1 Meteor 0" to make sense of this one...
As soon as Customer Care girl realised that she had nothing to give me, she became vague and effusive. At other times she rang me while driving and got quite aggressive because I wouldn't accept free call credit. (I couldn't fly to Barcelona or the USA on free call credit now could I?)
Then in February a new manager of the business channel began work and got dumped with my ongoing customer complaint. He came across as nice and pleasant and wanting to resolve this issue on the phone. He told me he had a voucher to send me, along with some call credit to make up for my time spent chasing this up. He said he'd deliver the voucher himself! Wow, now that's what I call personal service. I said thank you, and I'd hold off on closing this matter until I had read the terms & conditions of the voucher.
The next day nothing had arrived and when I rang 'Good Cop' to find out where they had gotten to, he was adamant that he had personally delivered them himself. It turned out that he had - to the wrong address. Klutz.
Cut a long story short, I received the voucher and it was SO restrictive. Basically it entitled a 1 armed albanian resident in Donegal to travel - on certain dates - and nobody else. It was not acceptable.
Imagine my surprise when I telephoned 'Good Cop' to politely inform him that this was not really what I had in mind, and he turned into another nasty, mean, distant automaton from Meteor. It was like a bad scene out of 'Total Recall' or something - me, trying to break through, using as wide a variety of words as I could muster...only to be met with - the party line, robotic repitition of the words handed down from the legal department: "As far as we are concerned this matter is closed."
I was furious. They were trying to pawn me off with the meanest shittiest voucher worth €100 that could only be used on a package holiday, not including the UK, must be for a week, and had to be taken by May.
Now, I had contacted the Advertising Standards Association of Ireland about this matter at the start in the hope that they might be able to use their might to fight on behalf of the little consumer. All that body did was write a letter to Meteor which Meteor ignored. After persistent prodding from me, they wrote another letter to Meteor and this time the phone company responded to say that the matter had been dealt with.
The ASAI told me in March, that I should contact the Consumer Association, or maybe ComReg.
ARGH. Why do we have these groups of highly paid paper pushers who achieve NOTHING? Meteor blatantly ignored the ASAI and did not show it any respect.
So what would you do in this situation?
Not give up.
That's what I did.
I instructed my solicitor to send a letter to Meteor claiming what was rightfully mine. And you know what?
They responded. And they enclosed a voucher - the original voucher which I was entitled to since last August. The one they swore was impossible to locate in this country! It's amazing the power of a few words written on legal letterhead.
Victory for the Little People!
And on the same day as I received the voucher in the post, I also received a letter from the ASAI to tell me that they would discuss my matter in a meeting sometime soon. Ho hum. This is May. I wrote to them in January.
Make your own conclusions, but mine are that the ASAI is just another bunch of space wasters. Meteor is a mobile business that appears to be put together with bits of dirty plaster and double sided sticky tape. And my solicitor is the hottest, best, most progressive one in this city.
And I'm on my way to Barcelona real soon! Adios.