Letter: More Telkom woes

It seems that Mr Kampf’s experience with Telkom’s appallingly bad service is not unique (Hello, can you hear me? Courier, December 9).
While I still have a phone line, I have no internet connectivity whatsoever and it appears to require onsite maintenance. The fault was logged on November 22 and numerous phone calls to their fault reporting number has yielded no success as of 8 December. I receive similar assurances of an ‘escalation’ of the problem and while Mr Kampf was advised that this effectively meant, at the very least, a call by a Telkom technician within 24 hours, I am now beginning to suspect that this might have been an error and should have read 24 days! In three weeks, I have had no communication at all from Telkom.
I have further additional issues with Telkom, one of which is the fact that my physical address, registered with the technicians, is listed as Club Drive, my address in the telephone directory as Camwood Road, while I live in Forestwood Road. No doubt someone decided to arbitrarily assign me a random street address.
I have been receiving my Telkom accounts by mail until they decided that I should not receive this information. A phone call to their billing department established that they preferred e-mailing the accounts – which suited me. I then received one account by e-mail and then nothing for three months. A further call managed to elicit another e-mailed account for that month and then nothing again. I have been paying arbitrary amounts on random dates. I have now been telephonically informed that my last account reflects a late payment fee. It appears the game they are playing is ‘guess your account and payment date’ failing which we will penalize you for OUR ineptitude. Nice one – Viva SOE’s.
CLAUDIO FERRI
Zimbali Coastal Resort