www.vodafoneareapileofshit.com

So, yes. The ongoing saga of the starship Vodafone, and its continuing mission to be as crap as possible. To boldly go where no man – where no one – has gone before, except maybe Southern Rail. They’ve been there. They’ve been there a few times. In fact they’ve been there so often they really should have a season ticket, which would cost them a small fortune and leave them feeling dissatisfied and disappointed, like coming home to find that someone’s eaten all the chocolate hobnobs and there’s only a stale digestive left.

But this isn’t about Southern Rail. This is about Vodafone, and their continuing mission to surpass every previously accepted norm of incompetence, like they’ve dug up Norris McWhirter and are trying desperately to revive him so he can create a whole new Guinness Book of Records entry for Most Pathetically Useless Company in the Western World.

Vodafone, you are truly, absolutely, mind-boggingly shit.

You already know about the ridiculous bill they’ve landed me with, as a result of La Child doing whatever the hell it is adolescent children do with their phones, but ever since complaining bitterly to Vodafone about it the company has managed to dig ever bigger holes. ‘Don’t send texts to La Child,’ I told them, ‘because she’s a child. If you can’t send texts to me, then at least send them to the number registered as the account holder.’

‘Yes, yes,’ they say, grinning like a local asked by a tourist for directions in a language they don’t understand, and of course an hour later La Child tells me she’s had the most bizarre conversation with someone from Vodafone who wanted to talk about ‘the complaint’.

Yes, after having been told that that particular number went directly through to an 11 year old child with neither the competence nor the authority to deal with the account, Vodafone called that very child to discuss why it is they’d allowed an 11 year old child to incur such horrific charges. You couldn’t make it up. So I call Vodafone again. ‘Seriously, lads, don’t call la Child. She’s a child. She’s 11. If she walked into your shop and asked you for a phone you’d tell her to run off and play with her dolls. Come on, cease with the silliness now.’

‘Yes, yes,’ they say, grinning like a… you get the picture. So I try a different tack. ‘OK, we’re getting nowhere now. So I tell you what we’re going to do. I’m cancelling my direct debit. I’ll pay you what I’d normally pay you, plus what I’d have to have paid up front you to use all that nice extra data. But I’m not paying you the balance. You want to talk about that, call me.’

And lo, the direct debit was cancelled, and today la Wife – la Wife, note, the number registered to the account holder at least but still not the number I’ve told them to call – got a text. ‘Oh,’ it said, ‘you appear not to have paid your bill this month. Would you mind awfully going to www.vodafoneareapileofshit.com to pay it please?’

As it happens, Vodafone, yes, yes I would mind. You can take your bill and you can shove it so far up your router cable that you might, just, possibly, start to take note of how very pissed off I am. I try to contact them again, specifically to tell them that their bill does roll up nice and tight and can therefore be used for anal filling purposes, but the website is down. So instead I wander over to twitter to vent. Vodafone respond with this: ‘have you tried our online chat service?’ Er, yes, I believe I have. And calling. Over the past two weeks I’ve spent about 4 hours on the phone to you cretins, and here we still are, no further forwards. ‘Oh,’ say Vodafone, ‘how about, er, our chat service?’

Fuck me with a big stick marked “Really?”

So Vodafone. Let me spell this out for you in words you might actually understand: DO NOT CALL LA CHILD. DO NOT CALL LA WIFE. CALL ME. UNTIL THIS IS RESOLVED I NO PAY YOU NO MONEY. You have my number, and so does the ombudsman.

Elbows out

To be fair, it was only a matter of time. 

Easyjet's not unusual. It's no longer a case of having the option of checking in online, the benefit of an additional service, something to make your life easier. Now you have to check in online, and after the failed experiment of forcing people to elbow their way to a good seat on an aircraft, a sort of blue rinse survival of the fittest, now seats are allocated to you. But no longer at the airport, where you might be able to speak to a human and suggest that, as you're travelling with a child, perhaps a couple of seats together might be a good idea. No, now seats are allocated online, when you check in online, because checking in at the airport is no longer an option. 

So here we are, in an aircraft full of families split up by an algorithm that clearly doesn't work. I'm sat in row 26 while my wife and child are in row 25. But they're not together: one is one side of the aisle, the other on the other. We're the lucky ones. We're within touching distance of each other. I've seen one mother have to tell her 9 year old son that she'll see him when they get there, leaving him sandwiched between two strangers ten rows behind his mother. Safe enough, I grant you. Where's he going to go? Perhaps it's all a wonderful adventure to him, a taste of independence. But perhaps he'd rather be at next to his mother for the next two hours, rather than two grown up strangers? And perhaps his mother might prefer to not entrust his safety to two complete strangers in the - admittedly highly unlikely - event of an accident?

Asking cabin crew whether this happened a lot, the splitting of families on flights, they said it was relatively unusual, but that 'well, they probably didn't book their seats early enough.' So this is a deliberate policy then, to force people to prebook seats? A shrug: 'it would avoid the problem.' 

The frustration is that pre-booking is of course a money spinner for the airliners. Choose your own seat online and that's a premium service which comes at a cost. Fair enough, you get to see a plan of the aircraft, you get to choose your favourite seat. But I no longer have the option not to. It's no longer a human eye that roves above the melee, allocating spaces on the basis of common sense. It's an algorithm that cares not a jot for relationship or age or need. And yes, of course some passengers will offer to swap seats, but many don't, and why should they have to? 

In short? It's bollocks. Much, frankly, like these headphones I just bought for the flight. You gets what you pay for, but at least the headphones were cheap.

But. 

Yes, there's a but. Having sat here for the past two hours, I've come to realise something quite marvellous about all this. A quite unintended consequence of the money grabbing. Most families have been split up over two or three rows, which has seen them lean across those sitting between them, speaking over the aisle, carrying on conversations over a distance. And wonderfully this has meant those surrounding them have been brought into the conversation. Suddenly, and for the first time in my entire flying experience (and I've been doing this a few years), we're all talking to one another. People are standing in the aisles laughing and talking and interacting. I'm loathe to give Easyjet credit for this, they've hardly set up their online booking policy on the basis that it might encourage people to be friendly to one another, but I'm suddenly equally loathe to condemn the policy outright. Sometimes good comes from bad.