O2 claim they have a special iPhone support line – dial 2302 free from your iPhone. Indeed, apparently they hired 1400 extra staff to man the lines.

I have no idea where they got them.

When phoning up to ask:

1. Is there any way of finding out how many characters I’ve typed in an sms (or at least, be warned when I’ve gone over 160)
2. If not, will I just be billed 1 sms per text no matter how long it is?
3. Or if not that, will you give me more SMSes on my account so I don’t exceed my limit of 200 by sending 160+ character texts by accident?

I got through to someone who, in the traditions of these things, didn’t understand in the slightest and kept trying to tell me the answer to my problem was that I could send up to 150 characters in an sms [sic]. She also asked me for my iPhone serial number, which is printed in tinylittleletters on the back of the phone. Great.

Her: “What computer do you have?”

Me: “Why does it matter?”

Her: “A Mac, great”

So apparently she’s going to send me an email with the solution to my problem. I heard a more likely story the last time Computer Weekly promised to take me off their database of people whose “records we need to update”.

I’ll wait for the email, laugh, cry, then try again and ask to speak to someone who both understands what texts are, and speaks English.

I hate tech support.

Update (30 minutes later): They sent me an email. It just contained this link: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305934. Time to get onto customer service rather than tech support, methinks.

Update (another 20 minutes later): A nice man from Apple rang, apparently the support person felt bad she couldn’t help me and asked someone else to give me a call. He said to leave feedback on Apple’s site, hopefully the top-requested features will make it into the next firmware release. I doubt O2 will give me any kind of extra SMSes on my contract, although I’ll still try.