I recently decided to get a contract phone, however i was reallyu only wanting to get the sony ericsson w900i walkman as I needed a decent mp3 player and certainly needed a new phone so thought I would kill two birds with the one stone.

I was originally planning on buying one from ebay and getting a sim only rolling montly contract which is about the best deal you can get at the moment but you know how it is, go on a 4 day bender or shell out over 200 quid for a phone, there was only gonna be one winner....so my options suddenly became very limited.

I went on to the Vodafone website to see what deals they could do me on that particular phone as they are currently the only network to offer this phone, otherwise I wouldn't even have considered going with Vodafone, you should trust your instincts bacuse usually they are right, especially with phone companies!

Anyway, enough mambo, back to the story. So I was on the web site but the deals were to be honest pretty pathetic, so I just give the sales line a call. I wasn't exactly overly impressed with the guys knowledge or customer service but hey, what do you expect when you phone a call centre, eventually the best deal he offered me was 200 mins and 500 texts for 30 beans a month with 3 months half price and free insurance, nowhere near the amount of texts and allegidly I couldn't add any texts bolt ons, somehow I doubt that but whatever, i've not checked up on that yet.

So i didn't get a great contract but i did get 3 months half price and free insurance and got the phone for free as well so cant really grumble. Well at least thats what I thought at the time.

I got the phone extremely promptly the next day which was quite impressive but they charged me for the next day delivery, not that i minded I was dying to get my hands on my new phone! I was and still am so impressed with the phone but after about 2 days the headphones stopped working. Pretty annoying when you consider the main reason I got the phone was for the walkman. But no big deal I thought, ive only just got the phone and its insured anyway so I took it to my nearest vodafone shop.

Extremely helpful was the idiot manning the shop, brrrrt! She told me it wasn't convered by my insurance so i'd have to buy a new set of headphones (obviously it wouldn't be covered by a years warranty like every single electrical thing you ever buy) and sent me packing, and not very happy.

So this was a bit of a pain to say the least, then when I was drunk I managed to switch of predictive texting and just couldn't get it back on, my own drunken stupid fault but the manuals that came with the phone were no help whats so ever but in all fairness this is nothing to do with vodafone. So when I was in Glasgow I took it in to a Vodafone shop and asked if she could show me how to put predictive back on, she took the phone off me, was in and out of a few menu's but couldn't see what she was doing then said there you go and gave me it back. So I asked her to show me how to do it for future reference, she looked at me like I was a piece of dog beige on her shoe and sneared you just press the hash key to change it like I was a complete idiot. Where is the customer service???!?!?! I also enquired about my faulty phone but she said there was not alot she could do since I didn't have the headphones with my, fair enough. I later found out it was nothing to do with pressing the hash key, she was the idiot, you have to go into a menu when you're texting to turn on the T9 dictionary so thanks very much for your help!!!!!

Next I took my phone with the headphones back to this same Glasgow vodafone branch to see if I could finally get the problem sorted, guess what, no I never! At least I found out it was the phone and not the headphones, I was then told to take everything I got from them back to any shop and it would be a straight swap as it had only been 14 days. So yet another trip required to sort out a phone that should've been working fine in the first place.

So Monday comes and I have to power walk to the gyle shopping centre from my work on my lunch hour, with everything that came with the phone back in the original box, you'll never guess what, they wouldn't take it and told me to phone up customer services to get them to arrange a courier to come out and swap it for a new phone so this is me in yet another vodafone shop and yet again told something different and sent somewhere else as no one seems to want to take any ownership of any problems and none of them showed a bit of customer service. So I then have to go all the way back to work, by the time I got to the burger van they had ran out of rolls so no lunch for me, thanks vodafone!

Eventually I get through to some total specialist in customer service, told her exactly what was needing to be done, the girl at the gyle at least left a note on my account to instruct the next idiot but no she still managed to ar$e about, put me on hold a few times before she finally managed to work out that what I told her to do at the start of the call was what she needed to do, but no before trying to tell me to take it back to a vodafone shop instead.

So I had to leave my phone in the house and arrange for someone to be in from between 8 and 6 to wait on them swapping my phone, luckily when I got home it was to a fully charged working phone, not before time i tell thee!

Sorry for totally ranting but I'm just so disgusted with the service I've been provided I needed to get it off my chest!!!!

If it wasn't for the fact they've at last sorted my phone out and due to the fact that you cant get my phone on any other network I wouldn't have thought twice about cancelling. I do not recommend Vodafone to anyone, shocking staff, disgraceful customer service and a serious lack of knowledge about anything has right annoyed me so be warned. The only good thing I can say about them is you get a good signal in major cities but I cant even get a 3g signal in my town.

Thats my story and rant over, hope this helps you to make a decision when the time comes to get a contract phone.