The Good Old Times
The good old Deutsche Telekom has arrived in Greece. All hail Telekom!
Seriously: For the past 25 years it was my personal experience that one of the few things that worked in Greece was the telephone, thanks not least to the OTE.
OK, things happen, but all in all it was reliable and support surprisingly quick and helpful. Maybe your experience is different but that’s mine.
Let the Experts Work
Something had to be done about this. And because nobody here managed to ruin the telephone system they sold it off to Germany to take care of that.
And by the looks of it they are doing their best.
I am not talking about the account website where you now find yourself flooded with stupid ads for things you already have or never wanted and you have to dig really deep to find the phone bill you are supposed to pay.
(To be fair, OTE is in the hands of the Telekom for over 10 years and you could tell by the amount of aggressive marketing blurb you were thrown at.)
This is just painful and confusing but the phone still works so that could not be the end of their efforts.
What if they could just let your phone number vanish some place where it is impossible to ever recover and get back to you? Think of all the services, authorities, websites, apps and important contacts you have to notify and update. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Well then, let me tell you a little story about how the Telekom managed to lose my mobile phone number:
It’s Almost Too Easy…
My mobile contract was about to expire. I had a super deluxe package with unlimited data, calls within the whole EU and a second SIM so my home router worked with the same contract.
All together for around 60 EUR which wasn’t too bad given what I got. I was happy.
After 2 years the contract expired and I was offered a renewal for a whopping total of 95 EUR.
I give my long standing clients better prices, not worse. But maybe I am stupid and they just have the better sales brains.
Now, what they expect you to do is either not bother and pay a ridiculous amount every month, or cancel the contract. Then they will call you and offer you a discount.
I personally find that sneaky and disgraceful and I decided not to play that game.
So I cancelled the contract and asked to transform the mobile number into a prepaid one.
Then I went to Germanos and got a new contract just for the data SIM in my router.
OK, the conversion did not go smooth – you can cancel as much as you want, they still insist on calling you and they won’t do it when they promise – but that’s something you can expect I believe.
But in the end I was told I had now a prepaid phone number which I had to top up one time with a slip from the Kiosk. After that I could use the Telekom account to reload, pick packages and the lot.
So I went to town and added the required amount with a number from a paper slip.
Ruining a Life With German Efficiency
Then I went home, opened my Telekom account – and all I saw was the data contract. The mobile phone number was gone.
That’s my main phone number that is registered with a ton of services, authorities, banks, insurances, apps and so on. I don’t even have a landline phone.
I found that a minor annoyance that would surely be fixable, so I went to the Telekom shop to make that go away. The ladies were trying their best but in the end said Telekom informed them that they are not allowed to handle that kind of issue anymore.
I wonder what they are allowed to do in that big shop all day if not serve their customers but did not want to ask. After all, they were really nice and helpful, wasn’t their fault.
So I was told I had to call 1388 to get this solved.
That’s where it started to go downhill.
I called 1388. A female computer greeted me with “You have 4 minutes for this call”, and I soon found out she was serious about it. Just when I had told the service guy what my problem was and he connected me to someone with a plan the line went dead.
Tried 3 times, same result.
Funny – say what you want but the Cosmote support had always been helpful and quite fast at it. Now they are called Telekom and stopped working it seems.
Well, it turned out this 1388 number costs money to call, but my complete prepaid balance had gone into a package that was supposed to cover all calls within Greece. But of course not the support. So aside from stealing weeks of lifetime from me, they asked extra money to call them and fix the problem they created.
Thank you but no.
The Magical Disappearing Act
So I went back to the shop. The ladies were again very helpful and even called the support for me. That’s when they found out my number had been deactivated and disconnected from my account.
Funny enough the number was still working and still is today.
But it was invisible in my account, so I couldn’t prove it was mine and I also could not convert it to COSMOTE/Telekom Neo which had been my plan.
The mind boggling thing is that I still was required to log into my telekom.gr account using exactly this invisible phone number…
After one week or so I received an SMS asking for the missing papers for my application to get the numbers back.
I never submitted such an application, maybe the ladies in the shop did.
But I did not know anything about it, did not know what papers and what application they were talking about but took the chance to send them everything that could be useful for them, from official documents for my tax number, phone bills proving the numbers are mine to passport copies.\
So they got more information from me than my bank, and I sent everything to the email address that was specified in the SMS. Needless to say there never was a reply. Not during the past 3 weeks at least….
Last try:
I went to Vodafone and applied for a contract and porting my number there.
My thinking was that between the two biggest telco giants in Greece they won’t play these stupid games.
I was so wrong.
After a few days the Vodafone ladies called and told me the Telekom said the numbers are deactivated and cannot be ported.
I went to the Vodafone shop and demonstrated to them that the phone number worked and the telekom folks were lying, so they went to the telekom center just to get told the same load of crap…
Go Crazy Or Just Go Home
I still do not know what exactly happened to my phone number. It is out there. I can not add it to my Telekom user account, the system says this number is not registered to my name. But if I try to open a new account with this number the system says the number already has an account.
So, my number is in limbo like Schroedinger’s cat.
It still works with scratch cards from the kiosk using cryptic SMS messages and going through endless automated voice calls:
“If you feel like killing yourself press #1.
If you feel like killing somebody else press #2.
For Hindi, press #9″
But who knows for how long until the teutonic giants realize it hurts even more to just switch the number off completely.
So I am living now with a brand new telephone number and have the pleasure to announce this fact to a gazillion of services.
Thank you Telekom.
I am sure – on the day that I have notified the last contact and updated the last service I will get an answer from the Telekom support that my account is reactivated.
Does anybody need an almost new telephone number?