You have experienced first hand, a classic issue with VM. Although you might think of them as an ISP, in actual fact they are better thought of as a marketing company, pushing their own wares, with a service provider arm grafted on as a sort of after-thought!
Their marketing and advertising people will often launch 'campaigns' and 'special deals' and 'new fastest broadband', type offers to try to garner interest and sign-ups. Fair enough, but what they fail to do is to make sure that the underlying infrastructure is in place to support this or that their customer support people are aware of any of this, have been trained on it, or have the ability to implement it.
In a way VM are now a victim of their own failures, for years their offshore CS provision has been an industry joke. Despite what is sometimes claimed, they are all untrained, generic call-centre workers, who can do nothing more than read off from a script in front of them - and when your particular issue isn't covered by said script, they simply make something up which might sound vaguely plausible.
And it really isn't going to get any better......!
