I’m in day 1 of what’s turning into a very painful process with O2’s insurance sub-contracted call-centre, The Listening Company. The irony of their name will become apparent. I also note with irony O2′s new ‘PR’ campaign “Banishing the Narks and Niggles”… doing away with underhanded practices and cheating customers. Oh dear…

So, a short history. I’m a business customer with O2. I swapped from Vodafone to get an iPhone early 2009. My iPhone appeared with a big crack one day, March time maybe. I keep it in my back pocket and must have sat on and cracked it… or it was in bag and got trodden on. Either way, it didn’t look good. The metal rim split and the screen popped off. I snapped it back in and soldiered on with fluff a crumbs accumulating under the touch screen for a few months until  I figured enough is enough, let’s try that expensive insurance and get this sorted. At this point I should say I’ve been paying for insurance since 1997 and never claimed a penny. So this was my first time.

I call O2. All good. They transfer me to The Listening Company. 45 mins later, still on hold, now 6.25pm I give up.

Next day, I call O2. They put me through to The Listening Company. 25 Minutes later, “Fatima” picks up the call.

It went something like this:

Fatima: Did you drop your phone?

Me: Nope

Fatima: How it is damaged?

Me: It has a big crack in the case and the screen pops out

Fatima: How did this happen?

Me: I’m not sure exactly, it must have been in my pocket and I sat on it and has been getting worse over the last 4 months.

Fatima: Ok, so I’ve rejected your claim due to wear and tear. There is a plan you can buy…

No matter how much I questioned her on her reasoning for this wear and tear decision out of the blue, she wouldn’t give any information. I was expecting to have a few more questions, maybe even give a detailed description of what was wrong. But the “computer says no” Fatima had ruled. It seems “damage” automatically becomes “wear and tear” if you don’t do anything about it at the time. Clearly bonkers but the key point is that as soon a Fatima pressed the “no” button, that was it. She wasn’t authorised to unpress it. That was that. Doesn’t matter if you subsequently clear up the confusion… it’s done. On your file. Case closed.

I asked to speak to a manager. Fatima assured me there wasn’t one. After a little back and forth, she said, “If you don’t agree, you’ll have to take it up with my manager, I’ll go and get him”… silence… Me: “So you lied to me?”… Fatima : “No I didn’t. Please hold while I get him”.

So I speak to the manager who was perfectly civil and I explain what a model employee Fatima was but that I didn’t think she was helping the company’s image much. Manager explains that he will review the recorded call and let me know later in the afternoon.

Yep, you guessed it. Nothing happens..

Later that day, I call O2. They put me through to The Listening Company. 35 Minutes later, still on hold, I give up.

I’ll will update this post as and when it happens.

However, in the meantime, I thought I’d share some tips on what I’ve learnt during my first claim, other than never use O2′s insurance…
So, assuming you have insurance…

• The insurance is dealt with by a separate company whose sole job is seemingly to not pay out a claim wherever possible. The ‘wear and tear” clause seems to be their best friend.
• First, remember all calls are recorded and are used to settle disputes, so be nice but annoyingly specific when needed.
• Before you start the conversation, I’d suggest you agree very specifically that you want the operator to summarise the entire claim evidence verbally before they make an assessment to double-check that you are happy that the evidence you have given is complete.
• Once they press the ‘computer says no’ button, this can’t be undone and I assume the record stays on your file. Hence why it’s important to feel you had the chance to say EVERYTHING you felt was appropriate and they have repeated it back to you.
• Assuming your was dropped and cracked… if they ask you ‘did you drop it’, say yes. Go straight to claim.
• If they ask you how it got damaged, give it both barrels. Don’t give them any cause to try and call it wear and tear. Don’t lie (obviously) but it seems you have to be as blunt and dramatic as possible of jolt them out of automatically classing it as wear and tear. I.e. “It fell off the table and smashed”. DON’T say “I’m not sure exactly when it happened, I only noticed it last week, I think I may have knocked it but I do it so often, it’s hard to tell what actually cracked it”. You may be describing the same incident, but one will get a much easier path the other they will try and claim that as ‘wear and tear’ to get out of the claim.
• Don’t dither about the timing. It seems this is one of the main contributing factors to the ‘wear and tear’ ruling. So phone up as soon as it happens to avoid being suckered.

As I say, this is my first experience so maybe this is just how it is. Heaven knows how much I’ve paid for insurance over the years and it’s dawning on me just why the insurance sector is so well paid.

It seems I’m not alone either… oh dear. Average of 1.3 out of 5.

Still, look on the positive side, I did learn something today. The Listening Company is an oxymoron.

I had a fiddle with the Apple iPhone developer kit last week and it was a relatively painless experience. I had an app, albeit a useless one, up and running within an hour, like so. Apple applied the same philosophy to their development tools as they did to their consumer-facing products. It was fun, simple and even a Visual C newbie like me could figure the basic out.

Just done the same to Google’s Android developer platform. Wow, what a difference. Where Apple installs lots of applications, tools and nic-nacs to fiddle with, Android can barely bring itself to unzip the scattering of .jar files and nasty looking anonymous files into a snappily named folder “android-sdk-mac-x86-1.0_r1″.

Hmmm ok. Discarding my own “if you need to look at the manual, it’s not very good” philosophy, I followed the ugly-as-hell installation instructions. What a can of worms I’ve just opened. I need to download a third-party development environment such as Eclipse 3.4. I Google it, visit their website but can’t figure out what to download. Eclipse IDE for Java Developers? Eclipse Classic 3.4.1? Don’t know. Didn’t bother… boredom setting in…

Once you’ve installed Eclipse, you also have to install the Eclipse Plugin (ADT) with it’s own set of tecno-babble installation instructions.

So now I’m ready for my “Hello Android” starter experience. I believe the expression in OMFG! How nasty and difficult can they make it?

Ok, what’s my point? My point is the internet exploded because of two things. Creatives and Flash. Before flash, developers used stuff like C++ or HTML. Some used Javascript but on the whole, they smelled of wee and old pastry and knew the names of all the planets in Star Wars. Coders stayed in their cave and designers stayed in theirs. Then designers found a tool they could play with without too much programming. They could make content for the internet that was fun, irreverent, thought-provoking, high quality and cheap. Tradition coders didn’t get involved as ‘Actions’ were too crude to make anything out of. I loved it and so did many others. I made Flash 4 games, sites, I solved problems and people started to see the internet as a fun place rather than a place where games had interfaces made with grey Windows UI buttons. Here’s the first site I ever made in Flash 4 btw, and it ran off text files! :)

The beauty happens when people cross the lines. The epiphany where code and creativity combine to create something greater than the sum of the parts. Content exploded. Games, videos, animations, crazy (and often pointless) websites popped up at an astonishing rate to feed the new demand of the first dot-com boom. I’d been using the web for 6 years before flash came out and in one year, it was astonishing what was happening.

Spool forward a few years and Flash updated its coding engine to Actionscript, then Actionscript 2… and now Actionscript 3. Coders can come to flash from C++, Java etc. and get developing straight away. Unfortunately, flash has started to get too complex for those pioneers of creativity, the bedroom creatives out there. Coders now have a bigger cave to sit in and designers are too busy playing with their iPhones to notice the gap that’s opening up again. Most are too young to know how it ‘used to be’. Those of us that remember know it was a sterile, fractured, dysfunctional and ugly place to be. If someone has an idea, it’s imperative they have the tools to express themselves without barriers. Creativity isn’t just for designers, it’s for everyone. I can’t express how important it is to offer tools to allow those with ideas to create them, to innovate, to inspire and drive the internet forward.

As an example, look at the winners of Android’s $10 million Developer Challenge. I’m sure they’re very clever, but please, these were judged the best in the world!

What Google have offered in this case is embarrassing and depressing. I’m a big fan of a bunch of their stuff but this smacks of slapping their name on someone else’s technology and turning a blind eye to their values. I cannot use their ‘open platform’ as it’s closed to anyone other than hardcore coders. Ok, you can argue that the Apple Xcode Visual C experience is pretty nasty, but the doors are wide open and welcoming. Google has locked theirs, dug a couple of moats and put a huge, angry robot on guard to quickly beat the enthusiasm out of any passer by.

Maybe that’s why they called it Android…