Twisted Kites

Sometime around new year I switched to 3 mobile network (with a beautiful LG Viewty KU990 phone). Recently checked the details about using it abroad on Three’s website, as long as I can connect to Three’s network in Ireland my calls, texts and data will be exactly the same as in this country, i.e. same prices, all comes from my monthly allowance, no charge to receive etc.

Pretty great deal methinks, not just Ireland but any country where Three have a network (roaming onto other networks is dearer obviously).

The only thing with Three is you have to speak to their call centre to activate international usage. I hate call centres to start with. Press 1 if you are a person, 2 if you are a yogurt. If you are calling about a wierd looking shape on your toast press 5. To talk to a womble press 6. For everything else press 27464829 and a half.

Three are one of those companies that use Indian call centres. After receiving cold calls from Indian call centres in the past I know it can be hard work, mainly trying to understand them. I’ve no real problem with companies using foreign centres (apart from losing UK jobs), as long as the operative and customer can deal with each other easily and pleasantly.

So called them up the other night (figured night here is early afternoon over in Asia so they’d probably be in) to activate the international roaming. The girl understood me easy enough but I struggled to figure out what she was going on about. After a few minutes (and having to ask her to repeat sentences a couple of times) I got the gist that the people that needed to do it were’nt there. I think.

Called them up again this afternoon to try again. The girl that answered tonight was easy to understand and communicate with which was great. So told her what I wanted, she confirmed my details, then had to put me through to another department. Then a man answered, told him what I wanted (due to to his general ‘how can I help you’ rather that ‘you would like to enable international roaming’ type thingy), he confirmed the same details (in case after passing the first security I suddenly turned out to not be me by the time the second person came on!) and he sorted it out. Very easy to communicate with again. Although he did feel the need to advertise their website (for the roaming info) by spelling it out as if I didn’t know the site, but then again he doesn’t know that I’m not a technophobic (is that a word?) slow idiot.

So that’s now been enabled, and not as difficult as I thought it’d be. Plus, it was almost instant getting through to them (after going through the button routine first) with no queue whatsoever.

I know I’ve not been posting much lately. (But then again not many do, my RSS feed blog updates hardly differ these days!)

I’ll try to try harder. Maybe if I can find a Mac OS widget or something for Wordpress it might help.

I’m sitting at Preston depot (got 4 hours here in the middle of the night), plugged the Macbook into the WWW with my 3 dongle, sorting my blog, listening to the iPod. I’ll have to use these lulls to blog more often if I’m struggling.

Anyway work has been busier than usual, my relationship is going beautifully (we’re both going to Ireland for a 5-night break next week, can’t wait), car is running well.

Also recovering from a cold, quite annoying but not tragic.

Regular readers (if there are any left that haven’t disappeared into the void themselves), keep on at me to keep updating. How is everyone doing?