Yesterday I purchased a Sony Ericsson K750i, It still has no credit and it's not for the want of trying.

I decided to embark upon this epic quest for phone credit by attempting to use my debit card via an automated phone call service. After trying five times due to my cards number or security number apparently being incorrect (even though I could see what I was entering was perfectly valid) I was told I had successfully topped up. So I waited for the credit to arrive, the next day I decided either something gone wrong or my operator, O2 really need to get their finger out their ****. Unfortunately a phone call to customer services confirmed the former assumption was correct. O2 had no record of me ever having completed this top-up, not surprising since it wasn't completed. Surely O2 should log all successful and unsuccessful attempts? It's a curious thing that they apparently don't and therefore have no records as my bank statement clearly shows the £20 they deducted, why is it not possible for them to check my debit card number against a list of top-up payments made to them, this and the lack of a record for a successful top-up would be proof enough. But no, that would be the sensible thing to do, like most large and incompetent organisations they have chosen the route that saves them the majority of work. I was told to contact my bank as they would "sort it out" for me - joy a trip into town and a visit to the bank for O2's foul up.

So after taking the debit card road and hitting a brick wall I decided to try the on-line top up path. This was a labyrinth of navigable nightmares, several times I was told I was no logged in by the top up page whilst the navigation gleefully quoted "Welcome Chris" at my misfortune. Eventually the server sprung into action and realised I was logged in, so what happens next? "You are not registered for Web & Mobile Top-Up". That's a nice error message, from that I understand exactly where to click to register for web and mobile top up's. Years ago when the Internet was young people used these things called hyperlinks to point you in the direction of pages you needed to visit, now they seem to be present only on navigational menus and guess what, there was no "Register for Web & Mobile Top-Up" button. After 20 minutes of looking in the mostly likely places such as My account or various registration pages I stumble upon it from a link titled "Amend your profile details" which oddly enough did not take me to my profile page but a page to link to a registration page, genius! I would have had a hard time finding a more obscure place to hide the link myself.

I'm clearly onto something here, the registration page has been found after all, a quick depression of the mouse button took me straight to a nice very large and very anoying brick wall of the "Error 404--Not Found" variety. So I guess that's another top up method road trodden with no obtainable end.

The text on the previous page "We offer many quick and easy ways to Top-Up your mobile phone so you'll never be out of call time." seemed to be making less and less sense.

So I have now exhausted the following top-up methods: "Web Top-Up", "Mobile Top-Up" and "Credit/Debit Card Top-Up over the phone". I'm left with "E Top-up" which involves handing a swipe card and cash over at shop that deals "E-Top-up's" or "ATM Top-Up". Neither which are available to me at this hour, unless of course I really fancy a drive into town to visit an ATM. Nor do I wish to have to go down solely for a top-up so that my mobile phone become more than an illuminated brick.

Perhaps I'll try the two remaining methods when I go into town to sort out my missing £20 of credit!



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