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This Couple’s Four-Hour Ordeal To Cancel Their Cell Phone Contract Is Nothing Short Of Infuriating

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No company wants to give up a paying customer, which is why some corporations will go to extreme and often unscrupulous tactics to prevent losing customers locked into contracts. (For me, a particularly “shouty” call with AOL in the early aughts comes to mind, as does the time I had to go to extreme lengths to get out of a Gold’s Gym membership for the ludicrous reason that I lost my job and was moving away.)

Nowadays, Comcast tends to be the national symbol for customer-service nightmares, but on the other side of the pond in the United Kingdom, people deal with Virgin Mobile, which is basically the British equivalent of Comcast. To get an idea of just how bad Virgin Mobile is, over the weekend one man named John Bull live-tweeted he and his wife’s staggering four-hour ordeal of trying to get out of their cellphone contract, during which they were subjected to a variety of tactics including blatant lies and just outright getting hung up on. You almost have to admire the wherewithal of the whole thing, if it weren’t so terrible.

Things started out innocently enough, as Bull initially tweeted his wife’s joy at canceling their cellphone service.

Unfortunately, things quickly took a turn for “Houston, we have a problem.”

If that sounds a bit shady to you, it is. Especially since the carrier could provide absolutely no evidence that said new contract was signed up for.

And what a surprise, there were no managers around to speak with.

When being faced with logic didn’t work, the company resorted to giving Bull and his wife the runaround.

Annnnd, finally the first hang up.

If Virgin Mobile thought they could get off that easily however, they clearly didn’t know who they were messing with. But their ordeal was far from over.

Once again the couple was presented with the unfortunate Catch-22 that only a manager could help them, of which none were available (possibly not even in existence?).

Here comes hangup #2, if we’re counting.

This time their luck was about to change. Customer service Clare FTW!

That was possibly the best use of the Shawshank Redemption meme ever. Only instead of crawling through a tunnel filled with human sh*t, it was a four hours of customer-service hell. We hope they enjoyed those pints. They certainly earned them.

(Via BroBible)