FastConnect: Phone, electricty, gas and internet connections

Reading through some of the top 50 blogs. I found, on StevePavlina, this little snippet from a review on a book called “Life on Purpose”. The book seems far too religious for my taste, and the review a bit wordy, but I did like the first bullet that Steve quoted:

 1. Become Incredibly Selfish.

This is translated by the book as something like ‘Do what you enjoy doing and are good at, and let others do what they enjoy doing and are good at.’ (wording mine)  It doesn’t mean be a selfish person in the normal sense of the word.

It’s the person to person version of Ricardo’s principle of Comparative Advantage, which states that we all benefit when we do what we are best at.

So I can’t stand dealing with the electricity, gas and other utilities – and they seem to sense this by switching me off and on. I seem to have to spend hours on hold, and then actually talking to a human is often very frustrating for me, as they themselves are confronted with rigid screens and I, well I don’t cope too well with poorly designed systems. I do try to be nice to the telephonists though as they have a tough job.

I’m just getting a short term lease sorted out here in Fremantle, and I discovered that here in Australia is a company that will, after you fax them your details, organise all of that for you. The pain removal factor here is immense.

They are called FastConnect, and the good news is that they are also in New Zealand. The bad news is that they seem to be heavily based on phone operation, which is one of the things that I am trying to avoid by using a company such as this. You fill out a form, it is faxed (yes) to them and they call you back.

Please guys – how about an easy online form and communication entirely by email? And that Australian website complete with ‘Secured by Apache’ and ‘verified by Geotrust’ stickers may have been acceptable in 1996, but these days you look like rubes.

They did call me back after the agent sent a fax, but when I tried to return the call there was, sadly, no answer.

I’d love to see (for me at least) a company with a simple modern website that will let me manage all of my utilities from one location – from set up, to installations, upgrades and changes and billing. Bring it on.

Or maybe, like Rowan, I just need an assistant or an outsourced service for everything. Still I’m not sure I’d trust Sub-Continent based services without much NZ/Australia experience for this sort of thing.