Ten reasons why I hate vodafone right now

 | 2 min
  1. I moved apartments two weeks ago and I still have no internet and won’t for another week.
  2. When I called Vodafone to let them know I was moving, I specifically asked whether they had any naked DSL plans. The guy I was talking to condescendingly explained that you can’t have internet without a phone service and basically treated me like an idiot. This was two days before vodafone publicly launched their naked DSL plans.
  3. The same weekend we moved, vodafone retired the www.vodafone.co.nz APN that Stephen’s and my phone was configured to use for our prepay mobile data, and didn’t even bother to let their customers know it was being retired. Hence we had no mobile internet for a week.
  4. Vodafone charged me a dollar just to talk to their useless helpdesk staff to ask about why my mobile broadband had stopped working. After being transferred from helpdesk to a ‘technical support’ person, all he could suggest was that maybe rebooting my phone wasn’t enough, and that I should take out the battery and sim card and restart it and then maybe it would work. After that failed he was at a loss until I specifically suggested to him that perhaps the APN settings had changed. After 5 minutes on hold he came back and confirmed that was the problem.
  5. Vodafone apparently can’t connect our phone line without knowing the phone number of the previous tenants (we don’t know what it was). When they discovered this, they didn’t do anything sensible like contact me and ask for the number. Instead, they just cancelled the connection request. They didn’t tell me about the problem until the connection date had passed and I called them …. 5 days later.
  6. They asked me to call them from the line so they could find out the number. I did so, and the helpdesk person I spoke to told me that they didn’t need my number after all, and they’d un-cancelled my request and I would be connected in four days time.
  7. When I wasn’t connected in four days as promised, I called back and was told that actually, the last person was wrong and they did need the number, and could I please go home and call them from the house so they could see the number, because it apparently wasn’t in the system from last time I’d called.
  8. I dutifully called them again and their system couldn’t see the number. Guessing the number was blocked, the only thing they could suggest was that I try to call myself and see if it shows up in my caller ID. How it could possibly show up in my phone but not in their system was something they couldn’t seem to explain.
  9. They didn’t suggest to me dialling 0169 to turn off caller ID blocking – the thing which a friend suggested to me which eventually led us to find out the number. They’re the telco, shouldn’t they know stuff like that?
  10. The fact that they will almost certainly try to bill me for three weeks without phone or internet service.