Data Protection Stupity

I normally desperately try to avoid any contact with any call centre unless I really have to and today's experiences remind me why.

Having just moved to new build house my wife used the TV Licensing automated system to change the address of our TV Licence. Today we get 4 letters in the same post consisting of 2 reminders (1 dated 2011), a warning of a site visit and threat of court action.

So I rang their call centre, ploughed through their incredibly irritating voice menus and eventually spoke to what passed for a real person. Despite having the name of the licence holder, the previous address etc they wouldn't help because I didn't know what payment method my wife had used. Now up to a point I can go along with this but all I was trying to do was to make sure the licence had actually been transferred but they wouldn't even say if there was a TV licence in place at the new address which seems unreasonable.

And then just for fun the Vodafone signal has disappeared, had been working fine. We have a business account so ring Vodafone and give number. Now despite owning the business I'm not down as the primary contact so I can understand that I wouldn't be able to change anything on the account but my question was purely can you tell me if there is a problem with the mast in the local area. Nope, data protection.

Turns out that the mast is broken and as we use the mobiles for primary customer contact this is more than annoying but I can't possibly see why they can't tell you that.