My parents (in their 70's) have moved to a new address. I thought this is a good time to look at their telephone setup. They already subscribed to Sky so I decided to go with Vodafone so they can get the discount for mysky.

I contacted vodafone on Thursday 17 to arrange things. On Wednesday 23rd I contacted vodafone again to see where we were at as my parents moved into their new house on Tuesday 22. Brand new house so has not had a phone connection before but all the wiring had been done from the driveway to the house and just needed connecting. Was told it would be connected on Friday 25th. I asked if it could not be done earlier as my parents are elderly and need a phone. 

Chorus arrived on Thursday 24 and connected it all up. Gave me a test modem to plug in to check if the broadband was working. He just looked at the lights on it. He did what he had to do and I told him the phone just had an engaged signal when I picked it up. He said it would take about an hour to be activated. I am still waiting. I am now worried that my parents wont have a phone for the weekend. The vodafone broadband modem arrived today and works fine.

I called vodafone again last night to say it was not working. A fault was logged. I had heard nothing today and I rung them again. After being shunted round to about 3 different people I was getting so frustrated. Was told I would have to ring back later in the day and get a status update. I said you ring me I haven't got time to be spending another hour talking to you. Guess what - no call and still no phone working.

When I spoke to them on Wednesday I asked about the Sky install. They said that they couldn't put it through to sky until after the phone had been activated so it wouldn't go through to them until Monday 28th. So not only would my parents have no phone they would have no TV as well. I rung Sky and sky came and put the dish up the next day. so at least they have TV.

My question is this - Why are big phone companies so hard to deal with? People move house all the time. Why does it take more than a week to get a phone put on? Why can't one simple 5 minute phone call do the job? I must have wasted 2 hours this week trying to sort it out and it is still not sorted. Why can they not ring me back and update me instead of me holding on to a phone for an hour? Surely things shouldn't be this hard. We are in Lower Hutt. Not in some rural area where I can understand things would take a bit longer.

Frustrated.