New Phone Hassle

It all started on Friday night browsing the internet and went to the What Mobile forum where I’ve been a member since December 2006. I post on there on a regular basis. I saw this offer Samsung Galaxy Europa i5700 for £40,  I told my partner Ursula and she said lets go for it. We went to bed.

We got up early had a shower and went for bus to Blackburn, went into O2 store and they had run out of that model of phone Samsung Galaxy Europa i5700. We had a look round the store but we couldn’t see it. We asked the sales assistant and she said it must have been an online offer by O2.

We left the store, walked round to Carphone Warehouse but it cost more than double than the O2 offer and decided we would go to nearby Accrington to see if we could buy it in-store so we got on the bus and travelled to Accrington we arrived and went into the O2 store, again asked and they didn’t have it in stock, I asked which local stores had them in stock, the assitant checked local stores but no O2 stores had any in. So we decided to go home and try and order them online from O2.

We got home I made some coffee and and something to eat, I then fired up my netbook went to look at the offer, and we saw on a different website that Carphone Warehouse would price match the offer.

This is where the fun and games started. I called Carphone Warehouse and after the operator saw the offer she asked her boss if she could price match it, they would but I would have to pay £10 topup, with the offer I didn’t need to topup, so I decided not to take up the offer because it  wasn’t really much of a price match.

So I went onto the O2 website and placed an order, Ursula attempted to do the same until her Visa Debit card started playing up, on Visa cards there’s an extra section to complete called verify by Visa and she couldn’t remember her password, it asked for example 7th, 10th 12th characters of her password.
Ursula then asked me if I could order it using my debit card, we have a joint bank account but it didn’t really matter who’s name it was in.

Ursula had an online chat with a sales advisor who advised her that the handset was completly unlocked and unbranded.

I placed my order and got a order acknowlegement by email and got one for Ursula too. On sunday I got an order confirmation with a order tracking number with DHL, I thought the other order would arrive by email too as the order was only ordered 3 minutes apart. When it became clear the 2nd email didn’t arrive Ursula went online to find out why only one of the orders was confirmed. O2 said that the email would arrive Monday. I kept going to the DHL website to track the progress of the order by putting in the tracking code. I went to bed, woke up on Monday morning and got up.

I switched  my netbook on and checked the status of my order at 1026 it was on the van out for delivery, at 1335 the intercom buzzer went off and I went down to sign for the parcel.

I brought the parcel upstairs and I opened the parcel took out the phone, assembled it and put in my 3uk simcard, and it asked for network unlock  code. So Ursula went straight back onto the O2 website to chat to an O2 Guru. We asked why had we been lied to, saying we was told it was an unlocked handset, and unless they were prepared to waive the unlock fee as it we given the wrong information. The man said it was not possible unless I was prepared to pay the £15 unlock fee-after  12 months. We were given a number to ring for returns. We also checked the status of Ursula’s phone and it turned out it was actually out of stock, despite being charged for 2 phones.

We rang the returns dept who said we could send the phone back because we hadn’t activated the phone via the O2 simcard.

We were given an address to send the phone back to, but were also told that the Post Office would give us a jiffy bag to send back, but the Post Office said no we had to pay for a jiffy bag. We returned home, again back onto the 0844 number, so we asked a bag to be sent , and they said they would send us one.

What really annoyed me was the way we were lied to and why did they deduct the payment before despatching the phone?