Broken systems and lying and/or *********** staff

I have been trying to do an upgrade from a month-to-month Flexi account to a new contract because I needed to get a new phone. The process started easily enough - I phoned in, requested the upgrade and everything was going alright until they had processed the order. It was only at this point that I discovered that they told me that I could no longer cancel the recurring MyGig bundle on my account until after the upgrade was complete. This was not an option, because the end of the month was a couple of days away and I did not want to get charged for data that I would not need under the new contract.

Long story short, it took days of phoning back and forth before the MyGig bundle was cancelled, at which point the upgrade had also been cancelled. Every time someone promised to call me back later in the day, I would hear nothing. The only calls I got were from the confirmations department trying to confirm the upgrade itself. Finally the Solutions department got a hold of me because they had seen that I had called Customer Care multiple times, at which point everything got cancelled.

Subsequent to that I have been fighting to put the upgrade through again. I tried to do it online because I didn't feel like talking to call centre staff again. It took two days before someone got a hold of me to check whether I wanted an upgrade or a new contract, because apparently the system is broken and marks upgrades as new contracts. I told them I wanted an upgrade, at which point he had to cancel again, and promised that the order would be recaptured as an upgrade later in the day.

Next day comes, I haven't heard from anyone so I phone the upgrade department. Nope, they can see the new contract order was cancelled but no upgrade has been ordered. The agent on the other end was unable to put in the new order because the system wasn't responding. To her credit, she did actually phone me back an hour later and successfully process the order.

It is now late on Friday and I will probably only hear from the confirmations department next week. My experience so far is that if you miss their call they only try again a day or two later so who knows when my order will actually be confirmed, never mind shipped. I was trying to get the new phone before the start of the month because I can no longer use my current one.

On top of all this I'm not even sure if my SIM card will fit the new phone, and I might have to pay for a new one? It's ridiculous to charge for a R5 piece of plastic and silicon when I'm paying Vodacom a large amount of money every month already.