You drive me cra-a-azy...

It’s the ‘O2 drive me crazy’ time of year again as my phone contract comes up for renewal…

Don’t get me wrong, I love O2 and they have been very good to me over the years, giving me hundreds of free text messages and generally looking past my emotional outbursts to see what they can do to help me.

When I can get their attention that is.

Early last year I managed to break two phones in two months, not their fault admittedly, but what was their fault was that there was no reliable email service that I could use to sort out the replacement. So I was left having the weirdest phone conversations with some poor man with an accent I couldn’t understand. This one time I burst into tears of frustration and put the phone down after having spent most of my lunch hour on hold in the first place.

Then, last June my phone died of old age – for some reason all my phones seem to have the life-expectancy of a daddy long-legs – and so I was faced with the usual predicament of ritual humiliation by phone call or living with a crap mobile.

So I called O2 and got some poor guy I couldn’t understand. I explained I was deaf and he said ‘You go to shop and they help you.’ Really? I thought. Go to an O2 shop, even though I have an online contract. So I did, and they were amazing. They called O2 online on my behalf, spend hours on the phone to them, and then got told they couldn’t order the phone for me as they were not me!

ARRRRGGGGH!

Eventually, as tears of frustration once again threatened to flow quicker than the Thames at high tide, the manager took me out the back of the shop put the phone on speaker phone and mouthed everything that was said. Except, I couldn’t negotiate my contract and so ended up paying double what I used to for half the amount of privileges. This made me mad...

With this madness fuelling my fingers, I wrote a slightly acidic letter to every email address I could find on the O2 corporate website. Eventually this nice lady wrote to me and asked me what was making me so cross. So I politely told her and she politely wrote back and fixed it all!

Hurrah!

Except now, one year on, my lovely pink phone is on its last legs – it limps through the day before needing to be charged again and on the rare occasions I use it for making calls, it makes me sound like a robot with a 40-a-day smoking habit.

So this week, I decided to write to the nice lady who had reassured me that she would always be on email to help me…

No reply…

*Sniff

Must I spend the whole of my lunch hour for the next three weeks on the phone in a fruitless attempt to get a new mobile? I think not…

So this afternoon I am going to flipping well write to every email address on the O2 corporate website again and hope there’s another nice lady, or even better, a cute man, who can give me what I want…

…after all, it’s not like I’m asking for much, just acceptable customer services for deaf people and…

a custom-built pink iPhone!