It calls itself the 24-hour Customer Hotline, but has anyone tried to actually SPEAK to another human being without having to wade through countless directions to punch in one number, then another, then having to type in your HKID Card number- on an iPhone???- then punch in your phone number with the hashtag at the end only to be told that the number is WRONG, baby, and which means calling 1000 again in the forlorn hope of actually speaking to somebody- anybody except that automated voice?
Welcome to the wacky world of PCCW’s 24 Customer Hotline Service.
This farcical chain of events doesn’t end either when one finally manages to speak to a human being on the other end of the phone. Uh uh.
Invariably, they are from the “wrong team”, and so starts another cyber works oddity as you’re placed on “hold” as the task of connecting you with YOUR “team” begins and where needed is the Patience of Job as you’re told that “all the lines are busy.”
What? A “24 hour customer hotline” where you can’t reach anyone? Is this the weirdest fucking oxymoron or what and why former wunderkind Richard Li- you know, the bumbling son of Li ka-shing who supposedly graduated from Yale or Harvard as part of the PR bumpf but was found to have graduated from neither- is as reviled as the companies he formed on a shoestring – PCCW and NOWTV- two of the worst managed and customer unfriendly names in businesses in Hong Kong that should join ATV as this city’s Three Stooges.
Such incompetence raises the much bigger question as to why these companies were granted licenses to operate in the first place.
But we all should know the answer to that one and why the Umbrella Movement will never go away and there being a need not to stop with the jailing of one-time untouchables like that old fool and crook named Rafael Hui.
Footnote: An hour after my trials and tribulations, I actually received a call from a human being at 1000. The problem faced had to do with the server- not my email server, but, wait for it, that of PCCW. And their 24 hour Customer Hotline Service couldn’t tell me this right at the start?
