We sort of gave up the Telstra and shifted to Optus for home line and broad band Internet service. It was the biggest mistake we have ever made in the last year. Optus is very disappointing on its service and bill description as both my husband and I prefer a very structured and clarified bill where we expect to see whatever could be listed in a telephone bill. Unfortunately, Optus is very bad at this. I don’t even understand their bills. More awfully, they stopped sending us a paper-based bill since early this year. We’ve got no hard copy record for the telephone payment at all since then, which drives us crazy. On the other hand, Optus has some cheating behaviours when they promoted their services in the first place. The agency “Behalf on Optus” hid some information and tried to take advantage of us. And when we questioned about it half years later, they said they have lost all the recorded tapes. Sha Bi!!!!! They are supposed to be shot dead on streets. But we have to admit that their Broad Band service is excellent. We can find everything from the Internet in the personal account page, where has been detailed to seconds.

Another one is towards energy. The guy who knocked our front door around the last October successfully convinced us to transit from Country Energy to Australian Energy. Then we had to pay the fee through the stupid and super slow POSTbillpay webpage which is ran by Post Office. The same thing happens on Australian Energy. Since we chose to pay online with POSTbillpay, they chose to not send us a paper-based bill, then we lost the record of energy payment as well. That stupid POSTbillpay, is supposed to send us an electronic bill when there is a fee generated. But for some reason, we’ve been missed out, which led the following episode that upset me very much.

This evening after I finished the work, I found a $410 overdue energy bill sitting in my mail box and it’s apparently a final notice from Australian Energy telling us we need to pay immediately otherwise they will cut off the energy. We totally were not aware off this payment at all. And we also had no idea which period of time this bill was covering for. So we had to ring Australian Energy to find out what was happening.

Anyway, it’s all sorted out. We are going to stop using POSTbillpay and do the Bpay. And the company promised to send us the paper bill from the next time. As for Optus, now we are kind of bundled with it despite that Telstra has seduced us for several times that they are going to give away some digital screen handset if we get back to Mommy Telstra’s arms. We don’t like Telstra, but we hate Optus as well. However, before we find any service provider could fit our needs better, we have to put up with Optus.

Lessons: Don’t trust Telemarketing people on the phone; and hang on with your old service providers as long as they are still providing the stable service, although they bore you very much or you have a desire for seeking some new stimulation.