What do you do when one of SA's biggest corporates LIE to you?

I registered for a Red Classic contract with Vodacom online on 15 October 2017. Vodacom punts online contracting as having free next day delivery. Well, it turns out that is not true. You might get that if you don't sign up on a weekend. The following day in the afternoon I got a call from a service agent who actually did the contracting. He said I will get the phone delivered within 3 to 7 working days. I was alarmed as this was contrary to the written promise on Vodacom's website. I was pleasantly surprised when the device was delivered the following day on Tuesday 17 October 2017.

My joy, however, was short-lived. The agent said the phone will be active within 2 to 4 hours of the SIM card being inserted into the device. In my excitement, I went home, charged the device and started transferring data from my current device to the new device. My assumption was that the following day I will be using the new phone. The following day I discovered that the SIM card was still not active. I called Vodacom's After Sales Department on ********** , the lady I spoke to indicated that a different department has to do the activation. She said I was given a false promise, activations takes 4 to 7 days. She committed to raise my query with the relevant department. I put the phone away until Monday 23 October 2017, the sad news continued. The SIM card was still not activated. I called After Sales by this time I was beyond frustrated, the agent I spoke to said my contract has been cancelled by some system error! I requested to speak to his supervisor (Thembinkosi) who was equally unhelpful. They stuck to their story, which was that my contract has been magically cancelled by the all-knowing and self-controlling "system". They promised me that they will send a courier to collect the phone, redo the contract and issue me with a new phone. This trauma was supposed to end within 7 days.

By Wednesday 1 November 2017, the phone had not been collected. In absolute frustration, I drove to Vodaworld in Midrand to hand over the phone in the hope of expediting the correction of this botched job. No such luck! Thembinkosi said they can't collect the phone because as part of an online contract, the phone was issued from a different warehouse - as if I needed a lecture on Vodacom's supply chain process. As a grieved client, I expected a resolution of a problem which is entirely of Vodacom's creation. To add insult to injury, Vodacom could not explain why 9 days have passed and their phone has not been collected. Today it's 3 November 2017, I still have the sparkling brick of a device that I can't do anything about.

This process has cost me over 2 GB of data that I used to transfer data to the device that must now be sent back to Vodacom. I have paid for a trip to Vodaworld that was not only unnecessary but fruitless. I have suffered extreme inconvenience, the reason I registered for a new contract was that I was frustrated with the current device and I was planning to travel abroad. Instead 20 days after registering for a new contract I still wondering what happened to SA's best network.