Moving again

Well, it's that time of the year again when, for no apparent reason, I have to move to a new flat. If I had a penny for every time I've moved since I first came to Scotland, I'd have precisely 12 pennies. Which isn't a lot, but it comes up to about 3.5 pennies per year, which is quite respectable.

Anyway, I'm still going through the Hell that is to move your accounts and contact details to the new address. And, as anticipated by Murphy's law, the simplest one should take the longest. Therefore, the deceptively simple-looking task of moving my current broadband account to my new address (we're talking about 5 miles away here, not across the solar system) had developed to a complete and utter mess.

You'd think that all you have to do is call the provider, ask them to move it, and they either can (great) or cannot (sucks) do it. Binary systems are clear cut and easy to deal with (anyone who's ever dealt with them is hissing and spitting at me right now, maybe there is a point in that). However, my provider has a more complicated process.

You call them to have your account moved, but they don't technically move your account; rather, they cancel your existing contract, charge you cancellation fees, give you a new contract for the new address and then refund you the cancellation fees. Oh, and it takes 7 working day to cancel, 7-10 working days to connect the new account, so the whole process might actually equate a move of account, if you're lucky and you time everything with the precision of a military operation.

Only it doesn't really, because once you get through to the call centre, you speak to
a) a general advisor, who then puts you through to
b) a cancellation advisor, who then forwards you to
c) a new account advisor, who then asks you to call
d) BT because there is a problem with the line (mostly non-existent).

Each of the four steps includes a 10-minute waiting period, and given that you're in the process of moving your landline as well, Murphy will make sure that you're making those calls on your mobille and getting charged dearly for that.

                                                                          JUST MOVE THE BLOODY ACCOUNT!

But then again, where's the fun (for them) in that, eh? For crying out loud, I got to the point where I, em, disfigured my laptop's keyboard (forgetting that, unlike desktops, there are vital components living under it, oops) while talking to them and trying to understand why this ridiculous procedure is not, in fact, ridiculous, but effective and reasonable. A joke of a process, it's still not done, despite me having spent 2 hours on the phone today.

And I still have to contact the electricity company to terminate my current contract, the bank to change my details (I'll tell you about the joys of dealin with a certain bank, let's name it SBR for now, in a future post), my mobile provider, my magazine subscription... Maybe I should just get a P.O. box address and be over with it. Or stop moving.