How not to buy a mobile phone

I've decided to buy a new mobile phone.

I know the phone I want, the plan I want, the network I want. What could be easier than to order it online?

And the order process was straightforward. Except that they wanted to deliver it to my home address between 0900 and 1700, ie when I would be at work. And it had to be me, to sign for it in person.

Obviously this was silly, so I phoned the call centre to ask if I could collect it from their local shop on campus, or alternatively have it delivered to my office address. After all the courier service they use is the same one that other vendors use to deliver spare server parts, so none of it would be a surprise to them

Calling the call centre was a big, I mean big, mistake.

The first call centre operator kept on putting me on hold while she found out that she couldn't do any of these things, and then lost the call. I redialled and got someone else. He claimed he could do all these things. He couldn't. More time wasted.

They now claimed that the order could not be cancelled and that the only way was to reject the delivery. Given their general incompetence at everything else I asked them to email me to confirm this. No they couldn't do that either.

I even got to talk to a supervisor who claimed they would credit my account with $10 as compensation for wasted time - not helpful when they couldn't actually deliver my phone to somewhere sensible.

The annoying thing is it is the deal I want (and no, for once it's not telstra or optus)...

update (21/10/2009)

Well things are looking up - first of all I found almost the same deal from Virgin, and then the company in question rang me to apologise and to agree to give me a $50 credit on my account in compensation (mind you I havn't seen the confirmation email yet)

What's more the courier company took the phone to the local (and slightly inconvenient) post shop for collection. The question remains of course why they couldn't let me collect it from a post box - again I'd still have had to show id to collect it ...