F for service , but an F- for effort.

I must congratulate Vodacom on being the leading South African Telecommunication service provider in South Africa. Not only have you for the last 2 months provided the kind of service one comes to expect from this fine county of ours but have managed to raise the bar so drastically that if lack of service were an Olympic Event this year in Japan, we would most surely be coming home with at least 1 gold medal. But alas, it is not and even if it were, I am sure you would manage to find some way to *******. it up in the most colossal of ways that the country would continue to whisper about in hushed tones, for the next 2 decades or more.

But this is neither a creative writing essay, nor is it a compliment (one hopes you have read past my opening line). I have taken time out of my life this Friday evening - which I usually reserve for more pleasant things, watching Netflix, playing with my daughter, or if I am ever so lucky, trying to give her a little brother - to instead write my very first HelloPeter review. Yes, I am THAT upset.

So, what could have possessed me to sit here and write this unnecessarily long review? Your products, inability to inform me that my phone has switched from Wifi to Data? That that Data, which I have not loaded is eating into my Limited Airtime, again without warning? That when I am most desperate to convert said airtime into Data your network seems to be down? Whilst all of these are good guesses and could be right on any day of the week that ends with the letter Y, none of them are enough for me to take time out of my life to bother writing something else I am sure you - whomever you may be - will just browse at, have a good chuckle, and continue to wipe that upon which the sun does not shine.

No this is something that happened more than two months ago. My wife's Mother, my Mother-in-Law, passed away in May this year. Now I know in the middle of a Pandemic, one person may not seem like much, but I swear, to anyone who knew this lady, she meant the world to them. Now she, had multiple phone contracts with you, her preferred cellular service provider. one for herself, and two for her youngest daughters. So, we have service provider, one deceased client and two already terribly upset family members who are now unable to use the phones they have as the numbers have been blocked.

This should be a relatively straightforward fix. Transferal to the deceased's family members to either continue payments, or in the event of my wife's simply convert to pay-as-you-go. We have been told as much by both your Call-Centre and five of your Vodashops. Did you catch that? Not sure if you did, perhaps it bears repeating? Five, that is the number five, numeral 5, that which comes before six. But why would we go through that many stores, you may ask? Well because, they are in all honesty, ***********. I am talking the level of service one might expect from say, McDonalds Ice cream machine, or the South African Postal service. You know, as useful as a *******. flavoured lollypop.

You see, and here is the fun part. You have created a paradox. Not the fun, time travel movie kind of got to get my parents to fall in love kind (I am looking at you Back to the Future), no I'm talking about time loops, or rather in this case service loops. Your Call-Centre tells us to go into the store to make the switch, the store tells us to contact the Call-Centre cause they need to have it authorised from that side first, the Call-Centre tells us they need to flag the profile so that the Shop can make the changes, the shop says, it can't be done from their side cause it is a Call-Centre function, The Call-Centre asks for some documents to be signed and that we can now go back to the Store, the Store does not have an Effing clue and calls the Call-Centre who tells them what to tell us, the tell us we need documents signed the same, ones we signed a week prior...fine...we do that again, and now there is no record of anyone having ever said the contract needs to be transferred. If you battled to follow that, I apologize. So did we.

Please could someone, anyone, just contact us and get this done. It was fun to write this, but the experience has been far less pleasant.