Sunday, May 08, 2011

What A Week!

This week started with strange mobile phone goings on, with my credit vanishing mysteriously and other odd things I couldn't fathom. It's funny how you feel lost these days when you can't actually use your mobile and it makes you wonder how we got by without them! (though we did fine at the time). The phone has been an ongoing episode all week and actually getting plain answers from Orange who are my provider has been less than easy, as their call centres all seem to be in India.

No disrespect to the Indian people on the phone but they are largely reading from scripts on their monitors and there always seems to be a language barrier as not all English sound like we are reading the news on the BBC ! The trouble with call centres is they know they have you at a disadvantage, (I know I once worked in one) and as soon as the phone goes down you are out of their hair and someone else will have to deal with you when you call back and explain it all over again. Certain promises from Orange have yet to materialise, but time will tell. It's the second time this year I've had problems with Orange, their staff in my local shop being particularly unhelpful a while ago. I'm probably going to switch to O2 network/provider in the near future, their coverage seems better locally anyway and deals look good.

This morning around 10am I got an unidentified phone call, well an 0845 number so I declined to answer it. It left a message which turned out to be my bank's fraud team wanting to talk to me. It turned out my card has been cloned somehow and there had been several attempts to draw cash from my account in Cairo and Bangkok! Thankfully all requests had been declined and they got nothing, fair play to my bank on this one, and their vigilant system. Still the whole episode makes you think about how secure things really are, especially in light of several million identity thefts happening on the Sony online network recently.

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