3UK's Repair Avoidance Centre

I never knew that mobile operators actually had repair avoidance centres!

An SMS Text News reader got me on instant messenger this morning to relate a tale of woe.

Grant’s handset isn’t faulty per se, it’s just that the back and front covers aren’t connecting properly. For some reason they’ve come apart. This was a problem from day one. Dust and muck is therefore getting in — thus Grant thought he’d take preventative action and whacked the handset off to 3UK support.

A few days later they got back to him. Not good. They couldn’t find the problem, apparently. I reckon because there isn’t actually a handset problem (you know, it works fine, it’s the case that he’d like sorted). This is despite Grant attaching a diagram to point out the issue.

Here is the diagram in question:

Grant’s getting more and more irate — as anyone would, sat without a handset.

But I’m willing to bet his annoyance was tripled when he was told that his issue was being dealt withby the Repair Avoidance Centre at 3UK.

Heh. Dear me. I wonder if you phoned up to make a late payment if you’d be transferred through to a new Get That Sodding Money From Him department. 😉

Looooooooooooooong ago I decided to part company with the traditional mobile operator/user relationship. I don’t bother with handset insurance, I don’t bother trying to get replacement or temporary handsets. I take total responsibility for my handset strategy. I don’t know if I could cope, at all, with posting off my handset into the ether then arsing around making call-after-call and waiting days to get anything.

In fairness to the mobile operators, it must be a total headache, having to deal with replacement handsets, repairs and the like. It would probably be cheaper to implement a new policy of no returns, just immediate replacement: e.g. If you send your handset to us for repair, we will send you a new £14 cheap-as-chips Motorola donkey phone by return post, and we’ll sell your old handset to somebody else to fix.