eircom and Meteor are punishing me for staying loyal!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

The bloke behind the counter couldn’t be nicer. He’s relaxed, smiling, honest, chatty and helpful. You can’t ask for much more from anybody working in a shop, but things are not going as well as they might.

I’m on a mission to buy a smart phone. The time has come. If I lived in my native London I’d have had one years ago, but up until now, living at the end of Europe’s western road, I’ve got away with using a Nokia dinosaur that’s held together with Sellotape.

These days my work demands I have online access away from my home office and although it’s embarrassing to admit it, there’s a marketing element at work here too. Over the last few months I’ve watched a succession of my clients’ eyebrows rise when they espy my ancient mobile. I take my work very seriously indeed, but if to them it looks in any way like I don’t, then that’s not good enough.

So I did a pile of research and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that all the deals are much of a muchness. Ooh mumma, what a surprise. Each network provider gives with one hand and takes with the other. Fine, then what I’ll do is stick with Meteor, because they haven’t given me any reason to leave them, and stay with Apple, because I’ve been using them since the Mac ’84.

What joy it then was to find out that eircom own Meteor and because I’m an eircom customer through my landline, I get several hundred squids of the price of a spanky iPhone 5. Great, this is all going well and I can keep my number, and himself behind the counter talks me through the jungle of plans and contracts until we find something that sounds just right.

Well it sounds just right right now, but gordknows what it’ll look like in two years time.

Now he needs to debit a euro off my credit card and run it through a check just so that they know I’m not a gangster. I tell him that my credit card’s already cleared with them, for topping up from my phone.

“Sorry!” says he, “We still have to do it. Can you come back in an hour?”

“Hmm, well, no, not really. No bother, go ahead and do it, and I’ll come back in another day to pick up the phone and sign the paperwork. Oh, and there’s still over 30 quid’s worth of credit on my mobile, so can I have that transferred to my new bill pay account?”

“Sorry, no that’s not possible. Different companies, you see.”

“Well no, I don’t see, because both names are above your shop’s door and one wholly owns the other.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.