The Speed of Progress
Why oh why has just dealing with what should be simple and straight forward issues become so complicated and so time consuming now? Over the last few weeks alone I have spent countless hours trying to resolve what should be pretty basic issues. Let me explain.
Regular readers would be aware of the telephone problems we’ve had to put up with over recent months. I thought this was all but resolved several weeks back but alas, not so. We are still operating on a diversion system waiting for our lines to be what they call “ported”. After waiting and waiting, I found out this week that the telephone that we transferred from a couple of months back is refusing to allow our new company to port the lines. In the meantime, I’ve had to pay two telephone companies for the same service and our phone system is still not functioning. But there’s more…. My telephone technician has advised me to put a complaint in with the Telecommunication Ombudsman, just to protect myself in case they don’t do what they have said they would. To do this I had to spend about half an hour filling out the online information. Based on a couple of previous experiences with “Ombudsman” and service providers, I have no desire to get into a battle of this sort again but, like so many, may have no choice. Goodness knows how much this has all cost my business and paying two telephone providers for the same service, just so they don’t turn everything off again is ridiculous. Screwed or trapped are words that come to mind. The amount of time and effort that has gone into dealing with this issue alone would run into weeks, not just hours and I still feel like a cork bobbing around in the Ocean not knowing what will happen next.
On Thursday last week, I received a letter from the ATO wanting me to give them a whole of reporting data to prove that we’d paid all the super contributions for our staff for the year ended June 30th. It will take quite some time to extract all this which includes bank statements showing payments etc. What’s annoying with this is that it came about after we had been given the wrong account details by a staff member. This went on for 12 months, unknown to us. In the meantime, the monies were returned to our bank account, but we had no idea what it was because the name against the money was totally unknown to us. We have been holding it waiting for someone to contact us about it. We finally went back to our bank and again, after a lot of time, effort and frustration, three weeks later the bank told us who sent it. Several phone calls and more waiting for people to return calls and we discovered what had happened and sorted it all out. I rang the ATO, explained what had happened and asked if it was still necessary to send all the information about our super payments for our entire staff and they said “yes!”
My point here being, just dealing with the various components of with the issues I’ve mentioned above, the amount of time and effort involved has been humungous. Is this really what the speed of progress has to be in this day and age?