French Companies Don't Have A Clue

I've been getting TPS through my ADSL line via Orange since I moved to France. I don't watch a lot of TV but there are a few things I want to see which are not on the free channels. One of the main reasons I got it was to watch French movies but as it turns out most of the movies they show are American or old French movies which I've already seen. Until a few months ago I did at least get to watch BBC World News but that has since disappeared without a trace. I see they are still showing it as one of their channels on their website but that is definitely not the case. That only leaves crappy CNN as the English language news channel.

I was getting pretty much all the channels and it was costing around 50 euros per month. I say was because a couple of days ago they cancelled my subscription, without warning. No, I hadn't forgotten to pay the bill. Apparently when I moved house, 8 months ago, I didn't notify them of my change of address. First of all, that's rubbish. I changed my address with France Telecom and the guy there changed all the TPS stuff for me and it has been working fine for 8 months. Secondly, even if they have my old Montpellier address, so what? I'm paying every month for this service why cancel it?

I rang TPS and of course the stupid woman was in such a rush she couldn't explain it to me properly. I asked her to slow down twice but she didn't. From what I gathered the contract couldn't be renewed because they had my old address? I don't know, was I supposed to sign another contract because that had expired? That doesn't make sense because I signed a new contract when I moved to Paris. So what happened? I guess I'll never know.

This is just another example as to why this country is crap and the economy is a mess. Companies don't know what they are doing and customer service is non existent. I always thought that this kind of contract was ongoing. So even though the contract was initially for a year, after that time the customer continues to pay and the companies continues to provide the service until the customer wants to end the contract. I've never heard of a company ending the contract with a customer who is paying the highest level subscription per month and would have continued to so indefinitely. They just threw away my business.

So now I'll either head over to Canal + or maybe I'll just skip the TV altogether and start reading more.