[Touch HD General] trentend:
Just to be clear, I was replying conversationally to you, not accusing you specifically. It does happen in this very thread, though:

It seems to me that you can summarise Oranges response like this:

Some customer services operators are ill informed, or are not clear about the extent to which they know nothing.

Some are well informed, but don't know when the phone will be available.

Continuing to ring customer services will not yield the answer that people want to hear, until the Orange system tells their customer service operators that they have phones in stock. I'm getting my phone via retentions for a business account. Over the past two months accounts for which I am the administrator (and authorised as such by Orange) have totalled something in the region of £1800 per month, so I tend to gain access to a more competent brand of customer service muppet. Previous experience (and I've been an orange business customer since its first year of operations) has shown me that route allows you to get phones often before they are made widely available (I got my tytn when it was still showing "coming soon" on the Orange system, for example). As far as the pecking order goes in terms of getting their hands on newly released phones, I think business retentions is near the top of the tree. As of Thursday they were unable to say when the phone would be available. That situation did not change yesterday.

Various random customer service individuals will explain the information that they have available to them in a slightly different way - because they are human beings. Customers my interpret this differently (the root of Chinese whispers) on the basis of what they want to hear - because they are human beings. I prefer to go to the most authoritative source I can, and get the best level of information that is available from that source. Currently the information I have is that I have no confirmation that the phone is available, and my phone has not yet been shipped. If we believe, and we have no reason not to, the account of one of the people involved in testing the phone then it has only just excited that process. It seems reasonable to me that it would take a few days to get into the channel in volume. Whatever the urgency Orange want to put on getting the phone out to custmers, it's unliely that they have their entire distribution arm poised and ready to respond to the "ready to ship button". It takes time for these things to flow from one process to another, and it tends to be lumpy and in low volume to start with. This period is often accompanied by apparently contradictory comments, often because the situation is a changing one and in different states at different points and times in the chain. Even if everyone was informed synchronously (and in a large organisation that rarely happens, certainly not over something as unimportant as the current status of one of more than hundreds of products), there is no guarantee that every member of an organisation assimilates the information at the same time. someone my read their company news at the star of the shift, and not check back because they are involved in (say for example) answering customer service enquiries.

I expect that I will be irritating many people by saying this, but I'm really just trying to explain from a business perspective, when dealing with a large organisation, that you shouldn't expect perfect information around a change of process or status. It's the nature of the beast.

This is important to us because we want to get our hands on an exciting new phone, but it is not the sole point of focus of every employee of Orange. I'm trying not to have a heart attack about that, so that I'm alive later in the week to enjoy my new phone. ;-)