Connecting with the internet – Telstra 1

Whenever you’re thinking of dealing with a person or organisation and, you can’t find an ordinary email address for them on the home page of their website, you know that dealing with them is a going to be a struggle – it’s that simple. It’s not rocket science. Mostly they’re not worth trying to deal with.

That’s the case with Telstra.

We used to use Telstra, but gave up dealing with 7 or 8 years ago, because on three occasions we got phone calls from people purporting to be from Telstra, so called “courtesy calls,” in which we were told of new services and so on. And we’d say, “Alright, email the details to us and we’ll think about it.” And the next thing would be we’d get emails saying, “Thank you for agreeing to sign up for this,” and, “Thank you for agreeing to sign up for that.” And it would take time and effort to sort out the mess. After the third of such occasions we cut ourselves off from them, vowing and declaring never to have anything to do with them again.

As far as we’re concerned, they’ve always been the same. Back 50 years ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, we were in an expanding business and every time we needed new phone lines or extensions we had to bribe someone in Telecom, as it was then, to get anything done. And in the 1980s it always happened that if you wanted more phone lines, you’d apply to Telecom and eight weeks later nothing would have happened – so you’d complain to your local Federal Member of Parliament and something would happen.

This might seem unrelated, but we’ve been really excited to learn lately that there are now “External Patient Advocates,” people who help people deal with hospitals – see this article. Excited because we’ve believed for some time that it is inevitable that there will be people and organisations to help you deal with organisations like Telstra – when you’re having difficulties you will contact them, not Telstra, they will have ordinary email addresses and they will help you achieve what you want to achieve.

You would think that Telstra themselves would want to do anything such people could do for you, to make dealing with Telstra a better experience – but that doesn’t seem to be the way it works.

Of course, we believe that such people would soon tell you that you are stark raving mad trying to deal with Telstra in the first place.

And, of course, it’s all about competition – you have to be able to find organisations better than Telstra. Fortunately, we don’t think this is that hard.

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