Dear Steve,
In response to your letter dated September 2006, YES! I did know NTL provided cheap phone calls. If I’m honest, this revelation didn’t come as a complete shock to me, you are after all a phone company. I’m not entirely sure such a statement required quite so many exclamation points and bold lettering. If you could provide an excellent recipe for Chicken Kiev, the whereabouts of Lord Lucan or a cure for cancer, those would have come as a much greater surprise to me.
With regards to the little problem I’ve contacted you with previously Steve ( oh you remember, NTL gave my details to a Scottish sales company called MGT, they gave them to their auto-dialler system, I got nuisance phone calls for weeks on end from the number 08000 272500 where it rung me and hung-up, leaving no way of stopping it) well, I thought I should update you. While I got absolutely no response from my phone calls to your customer support lines, I did when my last letter got out on the internet. The very next morning I got contacted by a very nice man called Kenneth Dugdale who is an Executive Officer with NTL. He apologised, which was nice as nobody had done that before, and he told me if I wanted to be released from my contract with NTL I could be, straight away, with no penalty. That was very nice, I assume you’re offering this deal to any customer who have similarly been harassed by MGT?
He also explained that according to your Outsourcing manager, MGT weren’t in fact a third party company that you’d given my details to, in direct contravention of my wishes as expressed in my contract with NTL. You see, you considered them to be part of NTL for the purposes of your marketing. In other words, someone who is not you, you decided to consider to be you because it suited you. It’s a crackingly good system, one I’ve decided to copy. So from now on, please send my bills to Mr Roger Wilson, 42 main street, Exeter, Devon. He’s not going to like it as he’s got no idea who I am but I’m sure if he goes through your Customer Service department it’ll get sorted out promptly and efficiently, I’m positive their complete ineffectuality in my case was a once off.
On a broader note, who am I to tell you who you are? Steve, if you want me to believe that the Scottish lady in that uninformative automated message I get when I ring 08000 272500 is you, then it’s you. Who am I to judge? If you want to come into the office in a summer dress and run around shouting “Ach eye, I’m a lady!†then you have my support. It’s the twenty first century after all.
All in all though, after NTL apologised and offered me the chance to break my contract with you (even though you’d clearly done nothing to deserve such behaviour) I felt appreciated and valued as a customer. I was however informed that the Outsourcing manager had made it very clear that you’d not stop using MGT and hence countless other people would receive similar harassment to that which I received. And, unless they went to Ireland and got a different number showing up on their phone which did finally allow them to speak to a person as opposed to shouting at an automated message, it’d never stop. I thought long and hard about all those people and a thought occurred to me – none of them were me! I’m alright Jack! Screw the rest of them!
In fact, not only have I decided to stay with NTL as a customer but I feel so basked in the warm glow of NTL’s love, I’ve now become a shareholder too! I don’t want to come across as Jonny big-Potatoes but after a recent shrewd addition to my investment portfolio (£1 to win on Keyaki in the 4:50 at Lingfield at 25/1) I had a bit of liquidity in my assets. I know that you and the other big knobs down in NTL towers will stop at nothing to make a buck and hence my one share is going to rocket in value. I’m expecting my investment to blossom into enough money to get me that tickle-me-Elmo doll I’ve had my eye on by the end of the year. Yes, technically this does now make me your boss but I don’t want this to make our relationship weird. I’m going to be hands-off. I won’t be coming around counting pencils and making sure nobody is using the photocopier for non-essential copying. All I ask Steve is that if you do want to come into work dressed as Scottish Lady that you save it for dress down Fridays and the Christmas party. (Give the outsourcing manager a wide birth though, rumour has it he gets a little ‘handsyÃ¢à ‚¬â„¢ with a few drinks in him).
And so, alls well that ends well… or so I thought. This morning some busy body with nothing better to be doing sent me an E-mail(who are these weirdos Steve?). It contained a copy of something called the Ofcom regulations, here’s a link to it
http://ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/...suse_state.pdf
Take a long hard look at page 5. It turns out that MGT’s and hence ‘ourââ⠀šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ use or rather misuse of the auto-dialler or predictive dialler breaks every last OFCOM rule. They don’t leave a message, they don’t wait the allotted 15 second minimum before hanging up, either I’m the most unluckiest man in the world or they drop a whole lot more than 3% of calls, they don’t wait three days before ringing again, they don’t provide a number to the person they’re calling to ring back… in short, we’re breaking every rule. These are government rules Steve, that sounds awful close to a ‘lawââ⠀šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ to me. I’m now a shareholder and I can’t claim ignorance and seeing as you’ve read this letter, neither can you. Let’s face facts Stevo, unless we do something fast, you and I are going to jail.
Do you know what they call pretty boys like you and me in prison Steve? Fresh meat! I’ve seen the movies, we’ll end up four to a cell, you, me, the outsourcing manager and probably poor innocent Ken the executive officer, all of us going pee-pee in a bucket! I have a sensitive bladder Steve, I can’t go with others watching!! Sure, due to non-discrimination legislation they’ll have to let you wear your Scottish Lady dress Steve but it won’t make you feel Ally McBeal-like in there, it’ll be a lot more like Prisoner Cellblock H. It’s going to get you a lot of attention from the boys in C wing. I don’t want to alarm you Steve but let’s just say you really, really don’t want that kind of attention.
Steve, Steve, Steve! There’s only one way for us to avoid a life of incarceration and being traded for a pack of smokes to some big ham-fisted crazy who says things like “youâ⠂¬â„¢re my little puppy now†and that’s whistle-blowing. I’ve watched Russell Crowe in the Insider on DVD twice this morning and I’m pretty sure I know what to do. Firstly, I’ve written to OFCOM and reported us, NTL, one of Britain’s biggest phone companies as being a source of nuisance phone calls to the very people we provide with phones. I’m naming names Steve, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. I’ve also contacted Watchdog, the papers, anyone who’ll listen and pointed out the hypocrisy of our actions. I’ve also contacted my MP, via the writetothem.com website and pointed out the abuses of the OFCOM regulations that we are making. Finally, I’m setting up a website and doing everything else in my power to highlight the appalling attitude that we at NTL have taken to customer care –viewing customers as mere coconuts to be smashed with the rock of never-ending sales pitches until they’ve finally given us all the bounty-like goodness of their money and then being cast aside save for occasionally using their shells to make fun horsey clipity-clopity noises. It’s not my best ever metaphor Steve but you get the idea.
Join us Steve, turn away from the dark-side. Suck thee not on the tit of the Outsourcing manager’s cruel attitude toward the customer, instead use the Force of good judgement and basic decency. Remember the good old days when customer care was about two things, the customer and the caring.
Your friend and possible future cellmate,
Caimh McDonnell
I can be contacted at
www.myspace.com/caimh