In reply to a post by professor973:

Plusnet line rental and anytime calls totals £16.49. Also PN 0845 is 7.5p per minute.

Not when you are paying £16.49 for Anytime Calls!

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by professor973:

Plusnet line rental and anytime calls totals £16.49. Also PN 0845 is 7.5p per minute.

Not when you are paying £16.49 for Anytime Calls!

I will not pay £3.50 to PN or £4.99 to BT for anytime calls when I don't make that worth of calls via landline. The other option with these two is around 20p for a short call billed by the minute instead of second when added to the connection fee. That buys a hell of a lot of minutes at 1.5/1.0p by the second with no connection fee. A total rip off against my mobile at 5p any network

Edited by professor973 (Mon 20-Aug-12 23:24:44)

I was calling an 0845 number today and was put on hold for about 15 minutes - if I had been charged by the second I think that might have been very expensive...

In reply to a post by 4M2:

I was calling an 0845 number today and was put on hold for about 15 minutes - if I had been charged by the second I think that might have been very expensive...

Personally I call non-geographic numbers once in the blue moon. I expect many others are the same, which makes the inclusion in packages a sprat to catch a mackerel. I also have better things to do than wait 15 minutes on the phone at cost in this age of email.

I wasn't querying what you personally would choose to buy, but merely pointing out an inaccuracy of fact in the context of what you posted.

Good thing that you don't have to call the likes of the Department of Work and Pensions then! It's essential to hold otherwise one is returned to the end of the queue if you hang-up and try again a little while later

Yes, there are quite a lot of organisations where you need to speak to someone as you can't get a sensible answer by other means. So having inclusive 0845/0860 calls saves you worrying about calling them (as long call does not go over 1 hr.).

What annoys me is you unsuccessfully search their website for the required info and so dial the 0845 # shown there. The 1st thing you hear is "We are sorry we are very busy. Why not try our website http://www.nousetomanorbeast.com for the info you need to save waiting?" and I'm thinking "I wouldn't be wasting my time phoning you if your website had the answer!".

BTW: All this is off-topic, but OP seems to have lost interest.

During the seemingly endless period of the hold a recorded message did also mention that the department is less busy between 8am and 9am ???

Anyway eventually got through but my enquiry was too complex for that officer to answer so she said that she would have to send an email to another office with details of my enquiry and that they would call me back tomorrow...so even after all that I didn't get a sensible answer!

Once upon a time, BC (Before Computers), the person on the end of the phone knew their industry and your case backwards (insurance, tax, DHSS, BT, Energy). Nowadays, with the advent of call centres, they only have a superficial knowledge or even no knowledge at all, just a pro-forma script .

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Once upon a time, BC (Before Computers), the person on the end of the phone knew their industry and your case backwards (insurance, tax, DHSS, BT, Energy). Nowadays, with the advent of call centres, they only have a superficial knowledge or even no knowledge at all, just a pro-forma script .

Yet one still has to go through a series of menus: press 1 for this, press 2 for that, surely once the correct department is found there should be a knowledgeable person on the line who can answer any enquiries since that should be their field of expertise? There seem to be layers and layers of one might call "sub-call centres" where there doesn't seem to be an individual on duty who is capable of answering an enquiry that is not covered by a script. Like peeling an onion made up of layers of scripts without anything substantial at the centre...

Is this the new world of IT where if humans don�t fit into a particular programmed category then their problems or enquiries can never be solved or answered?