A year ago I blogged about OneTel and how utterly crap they were. They’ve since been swalled up / taken over / rebranded (I don’t know) by TalkTalk, who are actually AOL. Unfortunately a few weeks ago, in the middle of changing my sons nappy, preparing his bath and cleaning the house up, they decided to call us up. Emily answered and we were told by someone with a very poor grasp of the English language that our existing “OneTel” account will be “migrated” to a TalkTalk account.
Ah… we should’ve known… If you’ve not read my previous blog about this then let me sum up. They offer insanely cheap calls but their customer service is perhaps the worst on planet earth. Today we had a letter from them which welcomed us to the new company. It also stated that we’d now be charged 1.50 per month for paper bills. Hmm.. strange, we’ve never had paper billing. I don’t think we get any paper bills off anyone and surely if our account was being “migrated” we shouldn’t start having them now. Now worries, I can login and sort it out. So, I try. It tells me to go to www.mytalktalk.co.uk and sign up.. Now, this doesn’t start well. The URL redirects me to www.aol.co.uk/talktalk, which I instantly dislike. I don’t like AOL. Don’t ask me why, it’s perhaps the way they water down the internet and install software all over your machine to make it their own home. Anyhow, after navigating adverts and a Yahoo-style main page I start the registration process and wait for the confirmation email. Hours later it arrives.. “Click here to confirm your registration” it says. I do, but the resulting page reports that “Your confirmation link has expired”. I look back at the email and find a bit of text that tells me to copy and paste a different URL into a browser. I do, but it fails. Why? Well, because the URL is wrong – it points to an internal test server. AFter more cursing and firing onto random links on their site I find a way to resend the confirmation link and – success! Another email arrives. It’s a bit broken, with some pictures not working and buttons not showing but it’s got a link and that’s good enough. I click it, then it finally displays the confirmation page. Hurra! All I have to do is enter my date of birth to confirm and we’re done.. ..Umm.. it doesn’t like it. I’ll try my wifes’ date of birth. Nope, that doesn’t work either. It appears that the guy on the phone completely goofed on the details we gave him. Now, this isn’t too surprising because the guy on the phone was only using partial English himself. I can’t register. I can’t stop TalkTalk charging us 1.50 that we didn’t agree too. Wait a minute, I’ve just checked their letter again. They’ll be charging the same amount per month as we previously paid with OneTel….. until next year when the cost will rise by nearly 3. Woaha – nice ! They’ve just increased our bill twice! Now, I wouldn’t normally write all this in a blog but I’ve just found out that TalkTalk / OneTel / AOL / RubbishPhoneCompany have removed our Caller ID too. What next ? Why not cut off our broadband for a laugh eh guys? This company are utterly useless. This is a comms company that is nearly impossible to talk..talk to. Worse still, we seem to be in a new contract, so we’re stuck with these people. Be warned, stay away from this company.