a few weeks back i was trying to pay my lovely phonebill online. you know the one - £50 phonebill with about £3 worth of calls on it and the rest down to BT’s fuckin ridiculous line-rental charges? anyway, their online payments system wouldn’t accept my switch card details. when i put in my issue number of 0, it said that wasn’t valid and that i had to enter a correct issue number. since the issue number of my card is 0, i thought this was a bit cheeky, but nevertheless i put in a made up issue number of 1 and the payment went through. while i was on the site and moderately irked by this, i filled in a quick “contact us if there are any problems with this online payment” form, letting BT know that their system needed adjustment, as it was rejecting as invalid, switch cards with an issue number of 0.
yesterday i got an email from BT as follows:
Dear Sir.
Thank you for your e-mail dated 13/7/05 regarding online payments.
I have carefully considered your comments and looked into the points you raised.
In response to your e-mail, I would like to inform you that the issue number is always greater than 0. If the issue number is 0, then it is not a correct issue number.
[and then several paragraphs of stock cut'n'paste bullshit about how much BT loves each and everyone of its customers as if they were its own children]
so there you have it. my switch card can’t possibly have an issue number of 0, because BT say they don’t exist. i must be suffering from some kind of hallucination!
anyway, loathe as i am to bother with the bunch of twats any further, i couldnae help dashing off a quick reply to that one:
hi.
as i understand it, the issue number refers to the number of such cards that a customer has been issued with. some banks do not track this information, so their cards always have an issue number of 0. my bank [bank of ireland] is one of these - although i have had about three or four switch cards in my time with the bank, each one has had an issue number of 0. i am informed by a friend who previously worked in a job taking bill payments by telephone, that this is not an unusual situation and certain other banks use issue numbers of 0 also. therefore it is most definitely possible to have an issue number of 0 on a switch card.
however if BT says issue numbers of 0 don’t exist, then they mustn’t. presumably i [and countless other people] are just too stupid to read a single digit on the front of our bank cards properly!
the quest to receive a sensible, relevant or even mildly logical email reply from a major corporation continues!
