I had many things to do in order to leave Adelaide and Australia.
You don't realise how tied down you are by bureaucracy and conventions until you try and leave. Cancel this, cancel that, notify this department etc etc.
Cancel the gym membership and you lose 6 months of payments (I pay yearly-no refunds)
Cancelling the phone turned into a nightmare.
Landline, Internet, Cable TV all-in-one contract.
I called Telstra (phone company) 2weeks before I had to get out of my house.
They said they couldn't do anything in advance, you had to call on the day and they'd cancel everything within 2 hours. It took a 40 minute wait to find that out.
So, they day before settlement I called, and waited in the queue for 20 minutes, spoke to a girl for 10 minutes, she decided I should talk to someone else, transfer and wait, then a young guy comes on and suggests that, to save the new owner connection costs and to guarantee ADSL for them, I should do a transfer to them. He assured me everything would be fine, he would look after the entire account change. I gave him the new owners phone number and left him with it, secure in the knowledge that I had sorted out one more thing on my list.
I phoned the new owner to give him the good news that I had saved him some money and secured his internet connection and that Telstra would be in touch with him in the next 24 hours.
All good, so far.
So, 7 days later, I'm boarding the flight from Melbourne to Bangkok. I'm leaving. I go to turn my phone off and a message comes through from the new owners "have not been contacted by Telstra".
It's too late to do anything, and anyway, I kind of don't care anymore. The new owners will have to sort their own account out, I can't be expected to do much more than I have already done. I had spent about 6 hours with them going over the property, how the pumps worked and the pool and everything else. The Real Estate agent had been slightly aghast at me doing this, it was unprecedented in his experience and he felt it could lead to them changing their mind and not settling on time. Maybe I'm a little too generous, but I felt it was the right thing to do, so I went out of my way to help them, and the phone transfer was just another thing.
How wrong I was.
Nearly 2 months later, I'm in The Hague, Holland. My son Jon calls me to tell me Telstra have contacted him and that my account is still in service, they haven't cancelled or transferred it, and the new owners have been using my account since I have left. I am being charged for everything, and Telstra have no record of me arranging an account termination. I won't bore you with the details, but I was pretty miffed about the whole thing.
So, it's now June. I have just received a final account. But, I am being charged for all the services I didn't use.
You get so tired of this.
So, I will go through another round of contacting, waiting, replying and hopefully after 6 trys, I won't have a phone account anymore.
But the thing that irks me the most is being treated like I have done something wrong.
I followed their sage advice. I did what they said. Every time the phone company didn't follow through on their commitment to me, I had to get back to them and start again with someone new.
It's cost me money and time.
Makes you not want to take out a contract with a utility company ever again.
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