seegers says...

A lot was going the last few days, so here is a small wrap up. After finding out that mail was apparently deliberately not being delivered to me, I called up the service of the postal comapny and registered my complaint with them. But there would be no feedback to me unless I complain a second, only then a written statement will be issued. So I have been thinking a lot about hoe many letters might have gone missing and who I should be contacting about all this. Really a headache. At least today I got the documents from C.-Bank. And I know of two other non-commercial mailings that should be here tomorrow or the day after. On the one hand I do not want to miss these, but on the other hand if one of them is not being delivered, I would have a reason to get a written statement from the postal service. It kind of bugs me that there is will not be an official reply about the reasons of the initial returned letters.

The night before yesterday I also had been sleeping very little, only about two hours and I had to return to Bosch again for my first day of work. Luckily this day was still a bit slow settling back in can getting aquainted with my new and old responsibilities. At least now I get a discounted lunch there.

Then in order to unclutter my life a little more, I try everyday to put two things online on eBay and try to sell them there. I have a lot things accumulated and a lot of books that I haven't looked at for years. And even if I get just one Euro out of these things, I will be happy. Especially all the books that are difficult to sell. But I suppose the books that still have some value are better sold on Amazon. On eBay only the auctions that start at 1 Euro are free to set up, so you run the risk to sell your book for only 1 Euro. On Amazon you can set any price and it is a lot easier to set up than eBay, but they do charge a higher commission for their services. So if you have the time and do not want to risk selling your stuff too cheap, it is better to choose Amazon.

And since it is cold, wet, cold and slippery outside and thanks to my foot, going for a run to exercise is a bit risky for me these days. I have become an even greater sloth. Well, in order to something about, I am trying the training schedules from
Hundredpushups.com and Twohundredsitups.com. Maybe I can stick to this and put a badge or two on my blog in about 6 weeks. Wish my room had a little more space though. Besides the bed, there is not much space to get down and do the exercises...

Oh well, time to sleep, got classes this weekend again.

Let's see how the story continues. Today I sent another email to the O2 support: "You can call me now, I am back in Germany."

Oh and there was no reaction to my four pages long faxed complaint either.

Yes, I do realize that I am making a big fuss about this, but no worries, it does not take up too much time or energy.

Recently i was flying with a low cost airline to Singapore. To offset the cheap ticket prices, these airlines try to upsell you on more and more things. You may have to pay extra for luggage that you are checking in, you have to pay for food (and you are not allowed to consume your own food on board - but what will they do, kick you out?) and the exit row seats with extra leg space are available for an additional fee.

During the flight, I also need to go the toilet and while I was sitting there doing my business, I thought: When will they start asking for a fee for using the toilet...?

Of course low cost airlines seems to have a low cost service as well. This is a quote from the auto-reply of my support request:

As we receive an overwhelming number of emails daily, we are unable to
attend to every enquiry.

After O2s last reply - which was still ridiculous in my opinion, I took a little while to compile the events together and faxed the result to them. All in all four pages and I think so far it is the longest complaint I ever wrote. And since I am still here in Taiwan, I am still friendly. If this yields no results, I can still escalate the situation once I am back in Germany.

And to archive it for the future as well as having a summary in Germany, you can find my complaint when clicking on the following link:

I think I am either getting some real headaches from O2 Germany or maybe I should simply quit my contract with them. In their latest message that they sent to me, I found one sentence that really made me wonder about their core work.

"Wir können Sie nicht in Taiwan anrufen."
We cannot call you in Taiwan.

So there we have one company which business is to sell you communication services. And yes, they probably outsourced their customer service to a call-center. A CALL-center, which should be very good at calling people.

I am really having some serious doubts in their abilities to provide good service and in their abilities to find good excuses to avoid direct customer contact.

I got another reaction to my complaint. I was notified my email that they delivered the bills to me. But no word about my other complains. No call back as I wanted to.

Maybe they hope by fulfilling one of my requests that I will be happy enough to forget about the rest.

This does not seem as if they are interested in retaining me as a customer.

After I got three bills earlier today for Mai, June and July, I also received the bill for August. And since I did not use my O2 sim card during that time, it helped a little to understand the bill structure, but added confusion somewhere else.

First of all, I have contract where I am not required to pay a monthly basic fee. Apparently they still charge a fee but credit the same amount on one bill. I suppose this is for bookkeeping purposes. Also I do get a student discount off 15%.

So, on my last bill for August:

Monthly fixed costs before tax:
- Genion S: 0.0084 Euro
- O2 Genion: 8.3949 Euro
(I still need to find out why there are actually two contracts listed).

Credits and discounts before tax:
- 15% discount: -1.2605 Euro
- Credit O2 Genion: -7.1428

So what happened here?

Discount = (0.0084+8.3949)*15% = 1.2605
Discount + 7.1428 = 8.4033 < 8.3949 + 0.0084

So basically first the discount of fee that I actually do not need to pay is deducted and then I receive credit for the remainder of the fee that I do not have to pay.

Confusing. But in all the bills, the remainder is constant at 7.14 Euro, which means in return that on all bills the discount on the monthly fee is 1.26 Euro. Let's remember that for now.

My bill from July:

Monthly fixed costs before tax:
- O2 Genion: 8.3949 Euro
- Genion S: 0.0084 Euro

Credits and discounts before tax:
- 15% discount: -4.9598 Euro
- Credit O2 Genion: -7.1428 Euro
- Connections / Talks: 28.3676 Euro

So my discount should be 1.26 + (28.3676 * 15%) = 5.5151 Euro. But my bill says only 4.9598 Euro. How can this be?

The solution is a always in the fineprint. The 15% discount does not apply for calls to hotline which charge special rates, just like the hotline of my bank. After deducting the money of that one call from 28.3676, the calculation fits.

Yes... it is complicated. No wonder there a special department in the call center that deals with inquiries about bills...

I have been with my phone provider O2-Germany for many years and usually I have been quite happy with them. So happy that I even referred a lot of exchange students and other friends that I was mentoring to them. Usually all my worries were easily taken care of by the service hotline.

Then one day however, they stopped sending me bills. The last bill that I got was for the month of April. Since then nothing. Of course it is obvious that I still have to pay and I wanted to pay. I did not want to accumulate more and more fees month after month. So I called the hotline to inquire about this issue. Their response was that there are some technical errors with the billing systems, but I could expect my bill within the next weeks.

A month later, I called again because I still did not get any bill. I was explaining my situation to them, that I will be going to Taiwan in about two months and that during that time, I will not be able to pay the bill as I have no income that is being credited to my German bank account. But sadly, there was nothing the O2-hotline could do. Only once the bill has been issued, it would be possible to discuss payment options. Also I was informed that apparently the billing department had to create the bills now manually for the affected customers and that I would be put onto a priority list. So I should expect my bills within the next two weeks.

Yeah right. No bill no nothing. The last time I called them to inquire about the situation, I got no news, but wanted to withdraw my permission for them to take out the money from my account. To bad that this can only be done in writing. Of course it is possible to use the webinterface to allow them to take out money from your account or to change bank account details. But there is no option of deleting your account details nor to withdraw that permission. And I expect that randomly changing your account details to something nonexistent would result in other trouble.

Of course being rather busy, I forgot to cancel my permission that allows them to take out the money from my account.

So now I am in Taiwan for a month already. I still have no new bill that I can see through the webinterface and if they mailed anything to me, it is of course in Germany.

But today I see in my bank account that O2 has withdrawn a good amount of money. Not happy about this.

Really not happy.

Going to mail the customer service now. I expect them to call me here in Taiwan to resolve this situation. Really curious how this will turn out.

At least some good news today. After only 3 Emails, 2 weeks and a few days, I finally got a the certification that I needed from my student office before. And this time I even got a friendly email.

Patience and persistence are two important virtues.

I needed this certification to apply to the Singapore Working Holiday Prgramme. Though I am not sure if I will still try go there and to be able to earn a little bit of extra spending money before I return to Germany...