A few weeks ago I was sitting in my
favourite chair with my laptop, appropriately enough, in my lap and the Blue
Jays' Playoff Game on the big screen, snacks and beverages lined up around me,
with my smart phone in my hand to check on the TV announcers’ facts, you know,
like all modern sports fanatics do, when an ad caught my eye between innings.
Usually I don’t see many ads as I am quite deadly with the remote control
flipping through the other channels during the commercial breaks and all but
this time I didn’t have a hand free for the remote so I had to watch the whole ad.
It was an ad for Crave TV. Hmmm... this looks interesting, I thought.
So,
while I'm watching the game I start Googling Crave TV, which is a Canadian pay
television video on demand service, and investigating how we could sign up for
the service because it’s looking pretty good. During the investigation I find
out that you have to be either a Bell Satellite TV customer or subscribe to SaskTel
Max Cable to be able to receive the service in Saskatchewan Bell Canada Bell Canada
There
are a lot of spare minutes during the watching of a nine-inning baseball game
what with the batters taking forrrevverrrr between strikes and the numerous
pitching changes and everything so without the risk of missing too much of the
ball game I thought I’d give old Bell Canada a call just to see what they have
to offer for satellite services and further check out this CraveTV.
By
the time I went through the pushbutton phone directions I finally got through
to a human voice which seemed to belong to a fourteen year-old boy. Anyway, he
announces that it’s my lucky day and he can provide this, that and the other
thing for half of what we’re paying for our current services with CraveTV
thrown in to boot. Installed! Excellent! I like it! Sign me up!
He
walks me through all of the information which included my name and physical
home address, something fairly important to the delivery of their services,
mind you, and he tells me we’d be receiving a confirmation email and the
technicians would be out in about ten days to install the system. Sounds great.
Back to the ballgame I go.
I
watched the rest of that game and another one, too, forgetting about the
confirmation email until the following day. I opened it up and noticed that the
Bell-boy/sales rep had mistakenly recorded my name and physical address wrong.
They had me as a Mr. Terry Hubbard and our house street address where the
Kipling Post Office currently sits. Terry is as good a name as any but it isn’t
mine and we don’t live at 600 1st
St
I
had to call back in to Bell to make the changes and after another forty minutes
on the phone I get reassured that everything is a go and they corrected the
name and address. A couple of days later I receive another phone call from Bell
stating that the installation service is only provided in Ontario and Quebec.
Really? Okay then. Whatever.
However,
upon reflection, I wasn't quite ready to give up just yet so I phoned a local
Bell Store and the rep there assured me that Bell Canada does provide the installation
service in Saskatchewan so she gave me a different phone number to call and I
did that and after another forty-five minutes of runaround the rep on the phone
assures me that we'll be getting our new Bell Canada satellite TV system as
first arranged. Sounds good.
The
final straw in the whole Bell Canada fiasco came to an end a couple of days
later when the last spokesperson that I would be talking to from Bell called to
tell me that they don't even know what a Saskatchewan IS let alone find it to
put in a TV system at 600 1st St in Kipling...THAT'S NOT MY ADDR....nevermind.
I give up.
All
I ever wanted to do was buy Bell Canada's product. It should have been easy. It
wasn't. Now, all I'm left to do is chalk it up as another one of life's
curveballs thrown my way, forget about the wasted time and continue on with
life sans Bell Canada Television.
"The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need
to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works."-Jeff Bezos (1964-).
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