Carphonewarehouse

Their incompetence costs them money too!

An appalling company, but I got lucky, too!

I found a deal on the internet for about £100, which was also, allegedly, available in store. I went to the local shop in Peckham, South London, and after fighting through the scrum managed to reach the service counter.

I was told "That deal 's not available here" and then "It's £30 a month on contract or £200 on pay as you go. Take it or leave it, mate"

Delightful. I left it.

I went home and ordered the phone online late in the afternoon (I hadn't yet read this thread!). The phone arrived at nine o'clock the next morning. A big plus point for the delivery company, even though it almost got me out of bed!

The phone was fine, but the pay-as-you-go sim card that came was not. It should have been activated, at the latest, by May 2012 ... three months ago! Carphone Warehouse were palming off old pre-loaded stock on unwary customers!

Anyway, I popped it in the phone in the forlorn hope that it would work. Needless to say, my new phone wouldn't recognise it.

I got on the phone to their Customer Services, on their premium 0870 number.

After fifteen minutes hanging on, on a mobile on a premium rate line, I grew tired of the usual message "Your call is very valuable to us, but we can't be bothered to employ enough people to actually deal with it" and hung up. After reading the posts in this column, I can understand why their Customer Service staff must be seriously overworked!

I had a couple of old sim cards (Orange and Giffgaff) kicking around, that I knew wouldn't work on a phone locked to O2. However, I tried each of them in the new phone out of curiosity.

Guess what? .... they both worked!

The Carphone Warehouse staff are so incompetent that they had forgotten to lock the phone to the network I had purchased !!! So now I've got an unlocked phone worth double what I've actually paid for it, and I can use cheaper networks too!!

I know that I was very lucky to benefit from these idiots. I've seen enough of their "Customer Service" to know that I'll never use these people again.

But it's nice to know that, sometimes, their appalling incompetence costs them money!