Virgin on the ridiculous

We have a Virgin contract which includes home broadband. When we informed them we were moving home, they decided to disconnect our email. For no apparent reason whatsoever. Other than to annoy us. Because as every marketeer knows, the way to stay solvent in a recession is to utterly wind up your loyal customers so that they will bugger off to a competitor at the earliest opportunity and tell all their friends about how utterly crap they are. My colleagues in marketing will know that this is how you achieve you "Net Detractor Score" which many companies actually use as the basis for bonuses for customer service employees. But I digress.

Being only a semi-Luddite (I can blog and do PCs but please don't ask me to transfer a call or use a fax machine) it never even occurred to me that in the 5 days between being disconnected from our old and connected at our new property, we would be unable to access our webmail account. It was so obvious that it never even crossed my mind to ask whether they would go out of their way to turn off a service which costs them nothing to run, but which is greatly valued by customers. Had I thought about it, I might have reasoned that continuing to provide webmail services while people are in the transition of moving homes would be a perfect opportunity to foster loyalty among customers who might appreciate being able to access their emails from every internet-connected computer in the entire world, from their work PC to internet cafes, especially when the one PC in the entire world that they cannot use while in the midst of moving home is their own!

Unfortunately it also never occurred to the Virgin "Helping you to move home" team (an oxymoron of morons) to tell us that cut me off from webmail was exactly what they planned to do, so we had no time to make alternative arrangements and forward all emails we needed to refer to, to another email account.

I tried explaining this ridiculousness to one oxyomoronic moron, who insisted that because my home wasn't yet online, I of course could not access my webmail account from another computer in another location, because it was an IT issue. When I asked to speak to someone who actually knew about computers, she put me on hold while she went off for several minutes to talk to someone in IT, and came back even more entrenched in her ignorance. When I spoke to the IT person myself, and he confirmed to me that there was no logical reason why we couldn't use any online PC, I told him to take the entire oxymorons anonymous team to a training day at an internet cafe. He commiserated, but actually understanding the basics of how computers work meant he wasn't allowed to change anything on my account such as switch webmail back on.

So we were resigned to losing all our emails and swiftly set up a gmail account (to which email to the @thelanglebens domain now goes). All emails sent to our Virgin (@ntlworld) account bounced back for a week. Including the email from Virgin Customer Services asking us for feedback on their service while we moved house. Which we therefore didn't receive. We only found out about this survey when, following the broadband re-connection, we were granted access once again to our webmail (which I'm checking from my in-laws' PC as we're still not back in the house), only to find a reminder email "you might remember that we wrote to you recently..." to complete their survey. The final twist: by the time I actually received the survey and tried to respond to give them some honest feedback, the survey was no longer live.

Should I email them a link to this post?

http://survey.ccsurvey.com/virg0701a/survey6.pl?kvgta634343739manem