No life
Ringing up trouble
Toby Young
I've just come back from a week's skiing in Verbier with my girlfriend Caroline where, unfortunately, our relationship took a turn for the worse. As regular readers of this column will know, I moved back from New York at the end of January to live with Caroline in London on a three-month `trial basis'. Oddly enough, the downturn in my fortunes had nothing to do with the presence of her father who accompanied us on the trip. No, it was all the fault of One 2 One, the mobile phone network. One 2 One, I've discovered, does not make two.
I became a One 2 One customer last month, having been seduced by a particu- larly attractive offer at Carphone Ware- house whereby I was able to trade in my old mobile phone and get £50 off my new One 2 One phone. Having secured this dis- count, I opted for the top-of-the-line model, impressed by the 'international roaming' facility that would enable me to make and receive calls on the Continent. At the time I didn't realise that this facility is absolutely standard on all the mobile networks provided you've got the right phone.
I called One 2 One customer service on the eve of my trip to activate this facility and was a little surprised to discover that I'd need to pay a deposit of £150. However, Caroline and her father were due to join me in Verbier a few days later and I want- ed them to be able to contact me on arrival so I paid up. You can imagine my disap- pointment, therefore, when I switched on my phone in Switzerland and was greeted with the words 'No Service'. I felt particu- larly humiliated because my host, Hutton Swinglehurst, was a Vodaphone customer and had managed to activate his 'interna- tional roaming' facility without any difficul- ty at all.
After I'd endured much crowing from Hutton I became determined to prove that the One 2 One network was every bit as good as Vodaphone's so I called Caroline — on Hutton's phone — and asked her to contact One 2 One to find out what was wrong. This turned out to be a huge mis- take. The customer service adviser she spoke to informed her that the reason my phone wasn't working was because the £150 deposit I'd paid wasn't nearly enough. Apparently, the amount each customer has to pay varies according to his or her credit rating and, according to this helpful gentle- man, I had a credit rating of four.
`Is that bad?' asked Caroline.
`It's the worst I've ever seen,' he confided.
Now it's had enough that this customer service adviser saw fit to reveal this confi- dential information to a third party, but to reveal it to my girlfriend was downright malicious. Frankly, she's the last person in the world I want to know my credit rating. Naturally, she passed this information along to her father — the second-to-last person. Throughout the course of the holi- day, whenever we were presented with a bill, he shot Caroline a knowing look and reached for his wallet. He wouldn't even let me pay for a round of Diet Cokes. The poor man's worst nightmare had come true. His beautiful, 25-year-old daughter had fallen into the clutches of a short, bald, unemployed, 36-year-old bankrupt. I felt like a villain in a Jane Austen novel, As soon as I got home I headed down to my local library to look up the Data Pro- tection Act. Surely, what the customer ser- vice adviser had done was against the law. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell he'd acted lawfully. Indeed, given that I'd fur- nished Caroline with my password, making it clear I'd consented to the disclosure of the information she was requesting, he would have been acting unlawfully if he'd refused to tell her why my phone wasn't working, I would only have grounds for a lawsuit if the information he'd provided was inaccurate and, unfortunately, he was almost certainly telling the truth when he told her I had the worst credit rating he'd ever seen.
Incidentally, he also told Caroline that, Just this once, he'd waive the request for more money and activate the `international roaming' facility on my phone in spite of my woefully inadequate deposit. All I had to do, apparently, was switch my mobile off and when I turned it back on again it would be working. I tried this as soon as I spoke to Caroline and, needless to say, the blast- ed thing still didn't work. 'No Service' were the only words ever displayed on its LCD screen, a phrase that will no doubt soon be coming out of Caroline's mouth as well.
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