It is easier to get in than it is to get out
Posted by Joanna Roberts on 23 April, 2008
Well, here I am. A fully-fledged Dubliner, complete with PPS number, bank account, new phone and tax credits – all astonishingly painless to set up. Mind you, in a country where 739,000 of the 4.3m population are immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they have their arrivals process down to a fine art.
What has been unexpectedly much harder is extricating myself from the UK – in particular my mobile phone contract. I started the process to end my contract two months ago; today after five phone calls and several thousand touch-tones choices I appear to be back, as they say, to square one.
Of course I understand why companies don’t want people to leave. But I don’t understand what they think they will gain by making it so incredibly difficult. I certainly haven’t emerged battered and bruised after my tussles with the (laughingly named) customer service department thinking: “Fair’s fair chaps, I tried my hardest but you won in the end. I now have a renewed respect for your tenacity and ability to hide the correct contact number on your website, only for me to then find out I need to write in to a postal address – brilliant! I think I’ll upgrade.”
