The trials and tribulations of working with Vodafone.

So, I have a small business. Vodafone offers a package, sounds good, except that lots of bits creak at the edges and different sims end up being on different accounts and "Oh No we can't put those in the same place.

Two months ago my mobile broadband sim failed. Went to the shop in Exeter for a new one. Spent an hour with their "business advisor" who insisted I needed to change the account. When I eventually escaped his parting shot was "Now you just need to ring 191 and cancel your existing account for this. So I did that on the way home and spent another 30 mintes on the phone supposedly untangling the mess but actually just making it worse.

Last onth I got a bill for £181 for early cancellation of a contract. No, that's rubbish. I haven't cancelled any contracts. So they removed that bill but i should have been warned.

Then I needed to buy an iPad to drive some kit I had and it seemed sensble to put the broadband sim in there. Perhaps it was. Bill for £97 on that sim for uploading some photos at the end of the month but I also got a text message to the iPad on 2nd Sept saying I had already used the full month's data and unless I replied sayin 1GB DATA (for which the charge would be £6 per month) I would be charged £6.50 for eery 250MB. But of course the text wouldn't send.

So I called 191 and spent 30 minutes getting nowhere. then lost the connection.

Tried again last night and after 35 minutes my phone ran out of battery.

So tried again this morning and after 45 minutes and 5 different people the line was dropped and they didn't call back. So afte a wait of another hour while my blood pressure came down I tried again.

This time seemed to get someone sensible and now I find that the first person transferred my broadband onto a simonly number I had for old pones to lend to people occasionally. Nothing I had done since then had helped. Now I am off line while they post me out a new sim card at a sensible rate. In the mean time I have been billed about £150 for data and lost about 5 hrs of working time.

I really would transferto a different company if I didn't expect the so called "service" elswhere to be equally crap.