Christmas heroes and villains

Extremely poor marks for Skype and Philips this year, a bit of advice for Virgin, and a surprisingly good experience returning something to Comet.

We wanted to buy the mother-in-law a simple-to-use Skype phone so that she can more cheaply call my various brothers- and sisters-in-law who are in far-flung places. BT’s overseas call charges are a scam.

We ordered a wireless phone from the Skype website. We were staying in Berlin and so we asked for it to be delivered to my brother-in-law’s address in Plymouth. Skype cancelled the order without informing me. Not only that, but when I found out and emailed them I received a canned response with a list of ‘some common reasons why orders are cancelled’. WTF?

I remained determined to reduce the mother-in-law’s phone bill. So, rushing to a nearby Comet store on Christmas Eve, I picked up a Philips Skype telephone. The box had a nice smiley person on it, and it oozed ease-of-use.

Cue two hours of trying to get the bloody thing installed and working on a windows PC – an install program that was bloody awful; settings that weren’t remembered between reboots; cryptic dialog boxes now appearing when the PC started up. At one point there were two boxes on the screen, one telling me to upgrade Skype to the latest version and the other telling me that if I did then the phone might stop working. Sigh.

Even when it did seem to be working the phone only intermittently showed the Skype contacts it was supposed to, and there was no way to call a number through Skype that hadn’t been entered into your computer’s contact list. Or at least, no way I could fathom out. Oh, and of course you only find this stuff out after you’ve left the phone to charge for ‘at least’ 24 hours.

Why do people put up with this crap? And why on earth does Skype give its seal-of-approval to such a piece of shite technology?

So, it went back to Comet. Ease-of-use my arse. To my complete surprise, the staff in Comet were really helpful and took the box back in good faith, crediting me back the full amount. Full marks there. I’ll shop there again because of it, and probably next time I’ll be shopping for a more expensive item.

There’s an example there that Virgin could learn from – be nice to people on the way out or they won’t come back. I bought Liz an iPhone for Christmas, and needed to transfer her number from Virgin to O2. However, Virgin provide no information on their website about how to leave their service, but plenty about how to switch from other suppliers to them. Nothing like being treated like an adult…