Meteor says sorry but dodges the question

“Meteor advises all customers to review warranty covering batteries and chargers, which can be found in the user manual . . .”

While Meteor may wish to hide behind “data protection” and a claim about warranty terms, the reality is that any contract is between the customer and Meteor and it has to take responsibility for all elements of that contract.

We put these points to a company spokeswoman but she declined to comment further.

Incidentally, our reader was more forthcoming about the outcome. We were told that the Henry Street branch manager rang her and apologised for how she was treated and said “he would pay the €35 and also pay one month”. The phone was ready for collection last Friday.

UPC masters art of bilocation billing

CLAIRE REEVES has contacted us about UPC. She moved house last March and brought her UPC account with her – or at least she thought she did.

“In July I realised that UPC were charging me for both my new account and my old account,” she writes. “Maybe I should have been more observant of the money going out of my account, but UPC seem to have given up on sending proper bills.”

She points out that the company has “no hesitation in sending endless junky ads in the post but they only send a text message now instead of a bill”.

According to Reeves, these text messages arrive when she is busy in work so she has not been paying proper attention to them.

“I contacted UPC to ask them what was happening and they admitted that they hadn’t moved my old account and that I was being double-charged. It took about five phone calls to increasingly rude staff members to get them to agree to return my money and there was certainly no apology.”

She was on holidays in August when she got another billing text message to say UPC had once again taken out the payment for the closed account.

“I called them when I got home and they said that they had never actually closed the old account, despite all my calls. They said that they had closed it now and would refund my money and raise a complaint.”

Reeves says she was not available to take a call during the day as she was in work but she still got two calls in relation to her complaint, both in the morning when she was working and couldn’t answer.