Troublesome TalkTalk day

More rain in the night and strong gusty wind during the day, but not much more rain thankfully. I woke up late to a breakfast of pancakes, sweet and savoury cooked by Clare while I was dozing. In the mail, a bank statement showing a a bill from TalkTalk that was double what I thought it should be, despite the fact that two months ago I cancelled a couple of add-ons which I thought we no longer needed. 

I spent the morning trying to get some sense out of the website chatbot, the Direct Messaging and SMS  helpline services. The chatbot was totally useless. The other two put me through extensive security checks to establish that I was the account holder, but couldn't give me a simple answer, so I was referred to the helpline which has a real human voice at the end of it. The queue of people desperate for an intelligent human being to talk to must have been very long, as the line just hung. No wonder the company is losing revenue and heading into crisis.

I returned to the website and switched on 'Call Boost' again, as this seems to be the only way to send and receive landline calls that can last up to an hour. The allowance of landline calls is generous, but without 'Call Boost' you can only phone other TalkTalk customers, and we have very few in our calling circle. The rate to all others is 24p a minute. This didn't explain why wi-fi calling from a mobile resulted in my being billed on my landline number. I returned to Direct Messaging with a simple question and this time got the response I was looking for. I had been mistaken to switch off 'Call Boost' in the first place, and paid for it very dearly. 

I think it's improper to use a term like 'Call Boost', implying an additional paid service. Once upon a time before TalkTalk customers gave up and started switching to other providers, maybe half the people called would be TalkTalk users, whereas nowadays it's one in twenty. The information is there in the small print on the website but not presented with sufficient clarity on the options pages. Half a day wasted trying to sort this out, before and after lunch! I was very upset.  I also messed up changing my account password and locked myself out of the account. 

The Direct Message helpline was helpful with this first time. It was a matter of deleting existing TalkTalk passwords from Chrome browser's memory, then deleting stored cookies and browser memorised history. Before doing this, I went out and walked for two hours until it was dark to clear my head. The wind was very strong, buffeting me as I walked along the Taff footpath. Once again the water level was over the top of the fish ladder. It's risen half a metre or more in the last 24 hours.

I changed the password successfully, printed off tomorrow's sermon, then cooked supper, before settling down to watch another couple of episodes of 'Off Grid'. It's long drawn out, with lots of unexpected turns in the plot and the fate of its characters, the portrayal of an ideal middle class family in deep trouble, with all having to cope with life changing identity loss is quite insightful.