then fix it, dear henry, dear henry, dear henry; then FIX IT, dear henry - what else would you do?

[fox]

In the continuing saga of my phone bill:  I went down to the Local Wireless Carrier shop today.  As planned, I asked the person who offered to help me if there was someone who was more in charge than anybody else, because I really needed at this point to speak to a manager.  Tall Guy Named Tom said he was one down from the manager, and was it possible that he could help me.

Well, let's see, I said.

So I explained my ongoing difficulties to Tom.  I showed him the receipt, and the printout of the e-mail Helpful Young Woman gave me on Saturday once she'd sent it to Customer Service, and the notes I took during my conversation this morning with Katie at Collections.  I told him the block on my phone had been removed, so that was fine, but my online access to my account was still suspended, which continues to be an issue.  Okay, he said, let's see what we can do -- and what he does is, call and talk to someone at some Customer Service-like place, and then send almost the identical e-mail again, but with slightly stronger language:  Please remove any bar on the customer's account.

Yeah, I said, but my concern is that they'll point out that there is no block on my phone, just on the account, and when I talk to them, they even acknowledge that -- see, they've stopped saying 'until the balance is paid', because I just say to them 'yes, but I've paid the balance', and we get nowhere, so now they're saying they don't dispute that I've made the payment, only they haven't received the payment, so something's not right here in this shop.  But what can that be?

Tom didn't know.  He didn't even properly understand my issue, really, until he had me try to log in to my account on his computer, and saw what I was talking about.  At which point he called up some other number and spoke to someone about what he now acknowledged to be a genuine problem.  'Right,' he says into the phone, 'yeah, the account number is -- oh, Chris, you moppet muppet.'*

The words didn't make any sense to me, but the tone did.  He finished on the phone and showed me where on the receipt from when I paid my bill, the account number was missing a digit from what appears in the system.  It's supposed to end with 11, see, and on the receipt it ends with 1.  This is apparently the source of ALL THE TROUBLES OF THE WORLD, and Tom borrows my receipts and goes back to see the manager.

The manager I'd asked to speak to in the first place, by the way, but I choose not to point this out.

When Tom returns, he tells me he's made photocopies of my receipts and he'll have to get in touch with the Finance department to sort all this out, but it should be fixed within the next twenty-four hours.  'Excellent', I say, 'but humour me for one second:  what if it's not?  Then what do I do?'

Apparently the next step involves letters and things, but Tom is confident that he's isolated the problem and this will fix everything, and it should all be sorted soon.  And, he says, without my even asking, they (he and the manager, I assume) will be having A Word with 'the moppets muppets* who work here'.

So.  It's not fixed yet, but by this time tomorrow, one hopes, my worries will be over.


*sebastienne reports that it is very likely what Tom said was, in fact, 'muppet'. Go figure.

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

You know those futuristic stories/movies where little nanocomputers live in the bloodstream and fix all diseases, and other little computers carry all of everyone's information so there's no exchange of money because you go into a store and a light reads your retinas and conveys your account balance to the store computer and the store knows exactly how much to let you walk out with?

Yeah. Stuff like this never happens in those universes. "I'm sorry, but the pollution-conversion nanocomputers in your lungs were de-activated because there was a mistake in your account number. We regret any inconvenience and/or lung cancer that this may have caused. Have a nice day."

[axiom_of_stripe]

'Right,' he says into the phone, 'yeah, the account number is -- oh, Chris, you moppet.'

i feel your pain, hon, but this is damn funny. :) *hugs you and runs away*

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Could be worse.

Could have been *Muppets* screwing up your account number.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i'm not actually positive he didn't say 'muppet'. i chose to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

'you moppet'? Seems pretty mild for a swear, or is it different over there?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i don't think it was meant to be profane. just that it surprised me even as an epithet -- you idiot (or eejit), you bonehead, you fool, i'd have understood, but moppet was a new one on me. :-)

[sowilo.livejournal.com]

well, I've always thought of moppet as a term of endearment, like you'd use with a little kid. But, I can roll with the "idiot" connotation.

[amoeba-j.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad they finally figured out what was causing the problems!

I guess it's ok that I was giggling madly at 'moppets' since everyone else seems to have already made the jokes that went running rampantly thru my brain ;)

[helenish.livejournal.com]

Let me point out that I have been following the Saga of the Cell Phone account with some interest, which is - I mean, not that you are an uninteresting writer or anything - but it's definitely a testament to my problems with getting absorbed in the minutae of others' lives.

Also, let me just say that "oh, those MOPPETS!" is about the greatest way to express irritation in a work setting ever.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

it probably was "muppet". it's very popular essex slang for referring to anyone who's been a bit of an idiot. it hadn't occured to me before just now that it is, in fact, regional, and i've never heard anyone from another county use it.

[corvidae9.livejournal.com]

I plan to fix that. I'd like to start calling people 'muppets', I think.

[orange852.livejournal.com]

So. It's not fixed yet, but by this time tomorrow, one hopes, my worries will be over.

I would definitely retest regularly.

Missing digit? In telephony, it pretty much is the source of all problems, or at least a major contributing factor.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

but not from the -- you know, come to think of it, why on earth isn't my account number the same as my mobile phone number?

[beats. head. against. desk.]

[sowilo.livejournal.com]

Because that makes far too much sense.

[impyvixen.livejournal.com]

But what if you wanted to keep your account with said phone company but change numbers for some reason? That way you wouldn't have to close out your account and open a new one. So by assigning a random account number, they're actually personalizing who you are as opposed to thinking you might be someone else who previously had the number you have. And then you can do whatever you want with your phone number.

Did that even make sense?

[impyvixen.livejournal.com]

And today, there's an article on cnn.com about the new version of the OED... and it specifically mentions "muppet."

They also said there were now 350 ways of insulting someone -- from "chucklehead" to "muppet" -- ten times more than there were complimentary expressions, while there were 50 words for good-looking women, there were only about 20 for men.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/08/11/dictionary.words.reut/index.html