Don't believe the hype (Eircom still sucks).

I had great hopes for Eircom lately. A new ownership together with new management seemed to herald a fresh wind.
Not so unfortunatly, like a new government but the same civil servant body Eircom is still manned by the same bunch of stoopid idiots that have been there for years.

Proof: I recently moved house. Both my the lines in my previous and new residence are on the same exchange. I know this for a fact as it's the only exchange in a 10 mile radius. My provider in the previous residence was UTV. I contacted them a week before the move and requested the line to be transfered to my new residence and that I wanted to keep my number. I was informed that this would be no problem.
One day before the move I received a call from an UTV respresentative informing me that the number could not be transfered because Eircom's automated system had refeused it as NOT being on the same exchange. I told the UTV rep that this was complete nonsense and he agreed to put the request in again. Two days later he called me back and informed me that the request had been refused by Eircom with the same excuse.
This pissed me off no end so I pulled out my "little black book" and called the local head of repairs for Eircom (I have his number from a previous time when there were huge ongoing problems with the local exchange). I told him my story and he confirmed that both lines are connected to the same exchange. He even told me that "sure, any eejit would know that".....
To help me he contacted one the person in charge of connections for this area who agreed. In fact he said that if they received a work-order they could transfer the number the same day.
I called UTV and gave them the names of these two guys and their contact numbers and told them to pass this information on to their Eircom contact. He told me that they only dealt with an automated system and had no contact details for a "real person" within Eircom. This does not surprise me as Eircom consistently tries to put as many layers between itself and it's customers.
Anyway, the UTV chap promised to escalate the issue to Eircom and to include all the information. I had a faint glimmer of hope that this would sort it.
No such luck. I was called by UTV today and told that Eircom had now refused the transfer because (apparently) the address was in a different county!!
This is an obvious load of nonsense.
Anyway they had informed UTV to ask me to cease the line in the old residence and to then get Eircom to activate the line in the new residence and to assign the (now free) number to this new line. Net result would be that I had my number, UTV was minus one customer and Eircom was plus 1 customer....
Being at the end of my tether I decided to try this. Well call me Shirley but the Eircom rep hardly needed any explanation and knew within seconds what to do. This leads me to believe that this is one of Eircom's un-official policies.
I will now probably have my number transfered within a week but Eircom have not heard the last of this as I have already referred this matter to Comreg.

P.S. Another interesting thing is that the line in the old residence stopped working within hours off me requesting it to be ceased but that it apparently takes two days before this registers on Eircom's systems...