It's the time you've all been waiting for - a whinge about mobile phone network operators. Surprise surprise, O2 have succeeded in disappointing me once again inspite of my very low expectations of them.

Around mid-january my Direct Debit transaction to pay my O2 phone bill failed because there was not enough money in my account. A mistake on my part; I quickly put the money in the account then, when they rang me and informed me it had failed, I paid the bill over the phone and told them to reinstate the Direct Debit. I figured that after that, all would be well again.

Yesterday I received this months O2 phone bill, only to discover that according to said bill it would not be paid by Direct Debit and I needed to sort out payment myself. This came as something of an annoyance. I rang O2 today to confirm that despite me telling them to reinstate the Direct Debit that they had cancelled it, so I then had to spend half an hour setting the Direct Debit up again and then also paying the current bill.

It then occurred to me that I had better check that the previous Direct Debit had been cancelled as I did not want to be paying my phone bills twice and I have no intention of believing anything the O2 people have to say. So this afternoon I walked into town and popped into Nationwide and sure enough, the previous Direct Debit was still active; meaning that they would happily have let me pay for the bill over the phone and then sucked the money out of my account via the Direct Debit as well. So, as you can imagine, I promptly cancelled it. I don't know if any of you have tried reclaiming money that has been taken out of your account by Direct Debit when it shouldn't have been, but by all accounts it is an absolute pain.

I guess I probably owe Orange an apology as I whinged about them messing me about over the phone for so long, but to be fair, it seems all phone companies are utter bastards.

On the plus side, it was sunny today for the first time in like 10 days and I got a lovely dairy ice cream.