POPPY LINDA AND HER AUTOMATED TREE OF PRESSABLE OPTIONS

I’m a bit run-down today. I’m not sure why; maybe the whole moving-home-in-less-than-four-days has caught up with me. Perhaps I’m just extra tired.

When you do move so quickly though, you could be forgiven for all the little things you’ve overlooked. I spent a little while on Friday cancelling all the utilities and giving them the final meter readings.

Then I wrestled with TalkPlus4UMediaNet, who didn’t want to make it easy to cancel. Oh no. They like you nice and locked-in forever, those people. They make you actually phone the TalkPlus4UMediaNet customer line, then they keep you held there for 39 minutes, in a battle of wills with a cheery lady I’m calling Linda, on a loop, over the top some poppy jazz.

“Did you know you might be eligible for super-fast broadband in your area?”

Sorry, Linda. I don’t currently have an area. But tell me again in about seventeen seconds, after this next lovely track from Now-That’s-What-I-Call-Lift-Music-1990. Maybe things will be different then.

After TalkPlus4UMediaNet, I tried to sort out the mail redirection with Royal Mail. They don’t make it easy either - in the end I had to trudge to the post office, then to the bank to get my second form of ID printed out (bank statement), explain why it wasn’t my current address, go back to the post office, fill out the form, explain to two people at the end of two queues… anyway. That took a while, cost a lot, and still only takes effect after seven days.

But the real head-scratcher was the TV Licensing people. Now, I don’t understand TV licenses. You pay the government, who then fund the BBC, even if you don’t watch the BBC but if you watch everything but the BBC you still have to pay for it. And if you don’t cough up to those people, they start sending round threatening letters, and then the bailiffs, and then I guess, Dominic Littlewood.

Their website was so unclear, in the end I picked ‘moving to another country’ as my cancellation reason. It didn’t ask me where, thankfully. I’m not sure what I would have selected if ‘West Berkshire’ turned out not to be in the drop down menu. I did get the feeling though that I was some sort of unpatriotic scoundrel.

Next thing is to return the router to TalkPlus4UMediaNet. They’re sending me a padded envelope with instructions on presumably taking it to the nearest tree stump by moonlight where it’ll be picked up by an elf on a unicycle.

You know, the older I get, the more I see the value in talking to an actual person instead of a computer or poppy Linda and her automated tree of pressable options. I feel like I can ask questions, maybe extract a little empathy, use those subtle nuances of conversation that get you somewhere because you’re polite, and likeable, and you can explain to a real person that you’ve left one address and you’re not moving straight into the next one. HAL 2001 doesn’t understand anything but cold, hard ones and zeroes.

I’m going to have set all this back up as well, aren’t I? Oh well. At least by then, we’ll be sunning ourselves in the tropical climes of West Berks. That’s what the TV Licensing people will think, anyway.