Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

Finally found some time to try to get through to Orange again. This time they answered their phone significantly faster although it was a lady with quite a strong accent who was difficult to understand at times. When I asked her about all the charges for Orange World Access she had the cheek to try and pass the buck to e2save and when I broke through the flaw in her logic she went quiet for more than a minute despite me repeatedly asking if there was anybody there!

Apparently e2save turned on these extra internet services and gave them to me for free for the first three months. After that they made Orange charge me for it. The rather large flaw I saw in this argument was that Orange gave them the facility to do that to my account, and then proceeded to bill me for it, and not e2save. I would say about 30% e2save's fault for quite dishonest business practices, and 70% Orange's fault but you tell me what your opinion is on that one.

Apparently she was being very generous offering to stop these charges immediately and rebate one month. Apparently the fact that I never asked for these services, never used them but still paid for them is quite beside the point. I let her know that they had obviously lost a customer with this terrible service but I really must find the time to get some addresses for the industry watchdog as this is very poor behaviour even if they are somehow staying within the law.

It really makes me despair to see service dropping to levels this low. With attitudes like, "Well you didn't notice very quickly so it is OK for us to charge you for things you didn't ask for"! May be all the providers are behaving this way now but I certainly never had any of this with T-Mobile, I just fancied a change and always thought Orange was supposed to be quite good. Now I am stuck with them until the end of my contract but my bills have been ?15 a month or so higher with Orange than T-Mobile and my useage remains pretty much unchanged...

Over the last week I have spent a couple of days making sure I had done all the paperwork, completed the last few exams and went through knowledge reviews. Then I got roped into doing the open water course with Lucy and Craig, with Gordon divemastering too. Unfortunately he got caught in traffic and it was just me until Sunday when Mick ended up divemastering too.

Mark and Lynda did our supervising certified divers in open water dive and it was a tough dive with lots of interesting issues. We got through it in the end though! Once I get some photos of myself that I can live with on my certification cards (as Mark warned me they keep this picture instead of using a new one each time) I will send off my application. I am really pleased I have finished the course, I have learnt a lot and it has been really tough at points but it was definitely worth it.

I probably won't do much more diving in the UK until next year now as I don't have a dry suit (or the money to get one). That is probably a good thing so I can devote more time to writing up my thesis as that has slipped behind schedule a little. I will probably manage one or two pleasure dives before the end of November, and then I will have to wait until Egypt at the end of January. Hopefully all of our open water students had a good weekend and enjoyed the diving too.