I like getting new things, like, I expect, most people. So I’ve been looking forward for some time for the opportunity to upgrade my phone. (Apologies this has nothing to do with photography.)

I had a Sony Ericcson P1i in Summer ’07, which worked great for a while until it stopped sending texts. This got fixed, and then reappeared and stayed. For all of 2008, I’ve been back on my old K750i. Not the greatest phone on earth (and lately the 8 key has been playing up, so I can barely send xs. I mean, txts). So, I’ve been looking forward to the time comes that I can upgrade and get a better phone on a better contract. I even went into a Carphone Warehouse store in November to ask when this would be: December 15th, I was told. Yup, well over a year into an 18th month contract, I would be eligible for an upgrade.

The day comes and passes without much fanfare, and I naively wait for their phonecall. (You know the one – it comes at the wrong time for you, and you miss a million from them asking you if you want to upgrade before you finally have time to answer it.) It doesn’t come.

Today, however, I got a text saying “Dear JOSHUA, You are now due for a fantastic phone upgrade.”. (Awesome grammar there. Could someone tell them you don’t need a capital after a comma?) So I called them. What I’d been told in November must have been true: I was due an upgrade!

Apparently not.The woman on the phone when I called said no – actually I wasn’t due an upgrade until February 15th. Why was I sent a text saying I was due now? She didn’t know.

Having twittered about this, I was contacted by @carephoneware offering to see if they could do anything to help. Apparently not: the only response I’ve had from anyone at Carphone Warehouse is (to paraphrase):

If you’d checked your account yourself, you’d have realised you wouldn’t be eligible until Februrary 15th. Sorry about the misinformation.

Yeah, sorry for telling me something that wasn’t true: how about coming out and admitting you lied to me? It shouldn’t be the customer’s responsibility to check if they’re eligible for an upgrade or not, especially when a company is telling them they are.

The least I would have expected was an actual apology that admitted that I’d been lied to, and an offer to come good on the upgrade that had been promised to me (twice). Come February, I’ll be leaving Carphone Warehouse. Sod them.