Oh, I suppose I might as well give it a whirl, I thought, as the recorded voice began its dirge: ‘If you are calling to cancel your BT service, please press one…’
It would have been more accurate to say: ‘If you never use your landline and have only now, while doing your New Year financial panicking, noticed you pay twice as much for your broadband and phone package as you thought and have had a mild stroke from the shock, press one.’
I pressed one and the voice said I was in the queue for an adviser. The line then went dead-sounding, possibly to make me give up. But I didn’t. And after a while it beeped and an impossibly cheerful Scottish chap, who I could have sworn introduced himself as Callum McCallum, said: ‘I am with your customer value team!’
I told him I was a customer who would like some value. Was there anything he could do to reduce my bill from £52.49 a month for broadband and a landline I never use?
The answer was no, sadly, he could not reduce it. I was out of contract and the deal I had taken out two years before was over. ‘You are on a standard price for your service,’ he said, using the lesser known definition of the term ‘standard’ (meaning extremely non-standard), ‘which is Superfast Fibre One, unlimited 54 to 55 megabits per seconds’.
‘You mean megabytes, surely?’ I said.
‘That’s right, megabits,’ he said.
I sighed. ‘Look, is there anything you can do to get this down a bit?’ Or should I have said a megabit? ‘Can’t I just stay with BT rather than switch to another company?’
‘Can I ask who your mobile provider is?’ he said, with a mischievous intonation.
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