TalkTalk, despite thier name seem to have difficulty with straight talking. Every month for years I received an email confirming the amount to be billed for that month and confirmation the payment will shortly be taken. This month however, the email announced I was to be billed a double amount, with no explanation. so I accessed my acount and it had warnings that I had not paid last month's bill and I was invited to use a credit card to fix it, whereas my paymewnt is always by direct debit. To complicate the issue even more, my TalkTalk account showed the payment received but then negated. As the tone of the messages was that TalkTelk were totally blameless it seemed the finger of flame was pointing in my direction, or my bank. Digging deeper I found my bank account looked normal with other payments going through and the TalkTalk direct debit still active. This had all wasted my time but I had no choice but to investigate further and attempted to call TalkTalk, who again despite their name as a phone company cannot reliably operate a phone line. It took five attempts to have a converstation with a human which lasted 33 minutes. In this time I learnt that TalkTalk knew they had a payment problem last month that was entirely their fault and if someone like me discovered it, the instruction was to offer profuse apologies for the problem and say I need do nothing. So the stuff about paying by credit card was irrelevant.
If, If, If TalkTalk had put that information in the original email it would have saved me and TalkTalk staff a lot of time. And as I have now been given a discount for 18 months as a way of saying sorry, being upfront would also have saved TalkTalk money!
Some people call me Victor Meldrew. I don't believe it!
