This week's INM Irish newspapers' column.
MIchael Commane
This year the talk is all about bins. Last year it was water. But right now the bane of my life is phones.
Over the last few months the signal in my house has disimproved.
A civil-minded woman on the road emailed residents notifying them that she was having difficulties with her phone signal and wanted to know was it a problem bigger than her phone.
A wise woman. Emails started pouring in. Everyone on the road was having difficulties. And it was not one specific phone provider but everyone, irrespective, who they were with, was having problems.
On a number of occasions I phoned my phone provider, Vodafone. I was promised a return call within five days. It never happened.
So, last week, annoyed, I called. Get through to Egypt. I phone on my landline as the signal on the mobile is too weak and I did not want the call to go down. If my Arabic were as good as the English of the Vodafone representative with whom I spoke, I sure would be delighted. But it was clear English was not his mother tongue and there were moments when I felt I was not being perfectly understood. In such a situation, emphasis, nuances can easily be lost.
The upshot of the story is that a building in the vicinity has been demolished and on top of that building was a phone mast. With the building razed to the ground, the mast is no more.
On my first try, Vodafone was willing to give me a booster mechanism to improve the signal. It is priced at €100 and they would give it to me for €50. I was having none of it. I drew a parallel with my electricity provider and argued what an uproar there would be if a power station were decommissioned and as a result customers lost supply. We agreed to disagree and I requested to discuss my plight with someone more senior.
Vodafone kept their word. The following day I was contacted and asked for specific details. In a subsequent call they admitted that the removal of the nearby mast was the reason for the poor signal in my house. They agreed to add credit to my account and would post me out the booster mechanism free of charge.
It's great fun to win battles like that but it takes a lot of time, energy and maybe even brass neck. But it's worth it.
The lesson has to be that you always have to be ready and willing to fight your corner and for many people such behaviour might well seem odious.
What baffles me most of all in this case is how come Vodafone and the other phone providers had not planned in advance replacing the mast that, has been decommissioned. Vodafone have told me it will be a number of months before the mast is replaced at another location.
The demolition of the building in question had been flagged for a long time. The dogs on the street knew it was to be knocked. The phone companies surely knew exactly the resultant consequences.
Why did they not move faster? Wouldn't it have been nice of them to have written to customers in advance to explain what was happening?
The moral of the story is one has to be on constant guard to make sure you get what you pay for. Is that really how it should be? Nevertheless, I have to say thank you to Vodafone. But had I not got a brass neck the signal in my house would be negligible.
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