Unfair blacklisting hell

If I could give zero stars I would. My hassles with Telkom began before I was even a customer. They lost 3 applications for a landline and in hindsight I should have taken this as a sign of things to come. Here's a rundown of events.. In Feb 2018 I submitted a cancellation form via fax to the number that was on the form downloaded from the internet and received no response. After customer care were unable to offer an explanation the following month as to why my landline was still active I received an email in the form of "Telkom appreciated my online order request" and "your order will commence with pre-credit approval". Upon asking the Telkom Facebook team what it was about, I received no answer as is to be expected. July 2018, still no contact from Telkom. I contacted them via FB messenger and was asked for the account number that I provided and they asked for a copy of the cancellation form and transmission report that I informed them at this point I no longer had. No response. October 2018 after yet another facebook complaint due to nothing being done by customer care I received a message yet again asking for the account number. A week later I sent another message due to having gotten no response yet again and the following day I received this reply.

Hi Scott, apologies for the delayed response, the account is currently suspended and won't facilitate the cancellation order. I have logged a protection on the account and once the suspension is lifted, we will issue the cancellation order. Please remember your that your ISP only ceded the line back to Telkom on the 05/03/2018, and we do request a 30days notice so rental will be chargeable up until the 05/04/2018. The last payment we received on this account was on the 17/02/2018.^Anele

Seems pretty cut and dry doesn't it? Guess again... No further contact from Telkom until exactly a week later when I received this.

Hi Scott, cancellation has been processed we waiting for the bill print which backdate will be done o the account on the Dec account you should be received an updated account with adjustments made on the account from April where the service should have been cancelled , if no credit please let us know as we can do manual adjustments on account reversal.^CL.

Again, no further contact from Telkom. I am still waiting for this bill by the way. Fast forward through several more requests via customer care to 13 Feb 2019. I am the recipient of an emailed letter of demand from NDS (National Debt Solutions) stating that should I not settle R2283.66 within 7 days I would remain in default and negative info would be submitted to the credit bureau. Not long after this I found myself in need of opening a new bank account for work purposes. Nedbank tell me they can not open a cheque account owing to the fact that i have had a default listed against me within the last 12 months. As a result of this I gained access to my credit report via TransUnion and discovered that a default had been listed by Telkom on 10 January 2019 prior to them even sending the account to NDS. At this point I lost it and got on the phone with Telkom yet again. Apparently now I need to log a dispute with the billing department. I did as they suggested (on 18 Feb) and found myself calling them and giving my case number 3 times a week for the following 4 weeks to track progress, only to be told it would be escalated by both the facebook team and the call center, until exactly 4 weeks later to the day, a nice agent from the billing department named Wendy gets my call, opens the case and corrects the bill. She does all the needed calculations telling me that I now owe Telkom R39.16 and once the amount was paid a request would be sent to the credit management department requesting that I be delisted from ITC as a defaulter. Why not one of the other 10 or so billing center agents I spoke to on the phone couldn't handle this is beyond me. Within an hour I paid what they asked now that I have an accurate representation of what I actually owe. You would expect this to be the last of my worries. STILL NO... I have called Telkom religiously asking for progress in varying states of agitation every single weekday since then (18 March) only to be told that they would send an email to the Credit management department. 19 March I was told it can take up to 4 days, yet I persisted with my daily calls at 10 AM. 1 April, guess who is the fool. I am sure it has been 12 emails at least, sent by everyone I spoke to. Some even going so far as to say they had flagged the emails as "urgent". Same story. "All I can do is send an email" 2 April (Today), I speak to yet another agent in the escalations department who have been my contact department of choice for the past week. She looks at my account and says the only email logged on my account was from the day before and that no email address for me was confirmed in the email that had been sent. She claimed she would do what she could to have this matter seen to by the end of business today. STILL NOTHING. In the mean time, I am paying a fortune in bank fees due to only being granted a Pay-As-You-Use account, have spent hundreds and hundreds of rands in airtime constantly calling Telkom from my cell, my car has broken a cambelt and I am unable to obtain credit to be able to repair the damage resulting in extremely long and disruptive days to my daughter and fiance due to us having to share her car despite her working shifts. Imagine trying to explaine to an unhappy 2 year old that she has to come with dad to fetch mommy from work at 10pm and then still waking her at 5am to get her to grannys house so I am not late for work. Telkom is literally trying to ruin my sanity and yet all they can do is tell me daily that all they can do is send an email and that there is no contact number for the department that needs to help me. Where to from here Telkom? Are you going to reimburse me for airtime wasted? How about lack of sleep, emotional distress and loss of income for days that I am late for work? Perhaps a plush toy and an apology to my daughter for making her unhappy?

Where do I go from here? The Consumer Goods and Services Ombud? ICASA maybe? MyBroadband? An open letter in the Cape Times? Should I seek legal counsel?

What I want to know now is, what is Telkom SA going to do to rectify this desperately frustrating situation? How are Telkom SA going to relieve me of this feeling of hopelessness that they cause by putting me in a position that I have literally got no way out of?