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Ben Stower

It's Over iiNet

Updated: Oct 27, 2019

A complaint I sent to iiNet after weeks of incompetent customer service. To anyone looking at internet providers, please avoid these self-entitled hacks.


Hey iiNet,


This is kind of a funny story.


For the last 3 weeks our house hasn’t had any internet. Nothing. Not a single drop. Dryer than a dead dingo’s donga. Have we called? You betcha iiNet. We’ve called not once, not twice – three times? Guess again. We’ve called you four times trying to figure out why we’re still paying for a black box with twinkly lights. I mean it’s a pretty chic corner table centrepiece, but we’d really love it if it actually worked.


Let me take you back to three weeks earlier. We called you iiNet. We told you our internet had been down for a few days and we asked, hey what’s going on? You told us there was a problem in our area and that it could take up to 14 days to fix. You also said we’d be compensated for the days we didn’t have internet (which sounds much funnier when you get to the end of this tale). What edition of the “Generic Phrases to Get This Disgruntled Customer Off the Phone” did you pull that one from guys?


I’ve got to admit you got us with that one. Can you believe we actually waited 13 days to call you again? Yeah, sorry we couldn’t trust you for the full fortnight. You had that shifty look aboutcha.


So the second call. This time you told us that there was never any problem in our area and that the internet should be working. But it wasn’t a problem on your end. Oh God no, it could never be a problem on your end. Nahhhhhh. You told us we had to reset the modem (remember that twinkly black box I mentioned earlier) and wait 24 hours for it to start working again. Another great passage from the “Things to Say to Customers to Make Them Think We’re Being Helpful” guidebook.


I’ve trusted dishevelled gentlemen in white panel vans for longer than 24 hours, so this seemed like a reasonable length of time to trust you, iiNet. A regretful decision. Not the panel van.


We called again. A third time. This time you told us that there was no issue with the internet. That everything you could see on your end was working fine and dandy. You even ran tests (aka rolled across the office in your desk chair pretending to be an eagle). And those “tests” came back positive. Congratulations you’re having a baby! An internet baby. Except we weren’t. So we went back and forth with you for 20 minutes and when you realised this time you weren’t getting us off the phone so easily, you went and got a manager’s second opinion. We get it iiNet, you’ve got performance issues, but don’t lose so much confidence you need someone else’s help.


Guess what this “manager” said. Nah go ahead, guess! Alright I’ll tell you. He told us that there Was an issue with our connection, just like we were told the first time we called. Except this time it wasn’t an issue in “our area” it was a problem with the connection between Perth and Singapore. At this point we’re thinking you’ve run out of “Shut up this Customer” lines and are now just taking random phrases someone scrawled on the wall of the cubical.


You said, we need two days to sort out the issue. We said (amongst ourselves), we’ll give them two days and then cancel our internet, because this is ridiculous.


Guess what happened next! Ohhh come now iiNet, surely you can guess it by now. No? Well, three days passed and we still didn’t have any internet.


So we called again today. Our fourth and most favourite of all the phone calls to you iiNet. Are you still with me? I hope so. This is where it gets good.


I’ll speed this up (not something you’re very good at right iiNet?). So you told us the same old story today. So naturally we said we wanted to cancel our internet and wanted to be compensated for the time we didn’t have any internet and because you failed to provide the one service - The One Service - we’re paying you for, we didn’t think it was fair for us to pay a cancelation fee.


To be fair, we didn’t think we’d need a cancelation fee, because we’d already been with you, through the good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for more than our 24-month contract. But guess what you did you naughty little iiNet.


When, about six months ago, you gave us the ultimatum of either no internet or upgrading to NBN (upgrading! Hahaha. That doesn’t seem like the right word), we naturally upgraded to NBN. Not only did you charge us $300 for the NBN connection, you reset our contract.


You reset our contract. And didn’t tell us.


So today when we wanted to cancel, you told us we were breaking our contract and needed to pay an additional $300 to cover the cancelation fee.


iiNet. If you could see me now, you could see I’m shaking my head in a disappointed fashion. Needless to say we got absolutely nowhere with our fourth call, as we had with our first, second and third call.

Well that’s not entirely true. We finally reached the conclusion that we no longer wanted your fake internet. But when we told you we wanted to cancel, you told us you couldn’t reach any customer service staff and we’d have to wait for you to call us back before we could cancel.


You’re like an obsessive partner iiNet. Can’t you see this relationship is over. We do not want you.


We will eventually find a way to cancel our internet with you iiNet. And when you send us that $300 cancelation bill and the summary of our history with you (like we asked), we’re taking it to an ombudsman so that he/she can help us prove you haven’t held up your side of the contract.


And don’t think that one night when we’re drunk we’ll call you out of the blue asking for a hook-up. Ain’t no drunk dialling your sleazy self iiNet!


That pretty much sums it up. And if you found this post longwinded, tedious and relatively unsatisfying, well at least you know how we’ve felt for the past three weeks. We would’ve said all this on the phone, but it was pretty hard getting a word in when you were yelling over us the entire time.


Farewell.

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