What can you do when you have a nasty experience with a phone company and can’t get things fixed?

If you are the world famous Geneva-based Brazilian author Paulo Coelho with over 26 million Facebook followers you can do quite a lot!

Early this morning he took to Facebook to vent his frustration at the Swiss telecommunications company, Swisscom, and very quickly had offers of help from his neighbour and staff at Swisscom.

He posted an image of Swisscom’s logo superimposed, in large red letters, with the word FAIL and the comment:

“If you think that everything works in Switzerland, try Swisscom. Pathetic. I have the same problem since November, I pay the highest combo, and they are unable to solve.”

Then the likes, shares and comments started to flow in. This afternoon the post had 850 likes, 130 shares and over 200 comments. Some offered sympathy and regaled similar frustrations, while others defended Swisscom or described it as the best of a bad bunch.

Swisscom eventually made an official statement on the Facebook post:

“Hello everyone, we regret that some of our customers are not happy with our service. Of course, we want to change this and help you. Please contact us on one of our service channels, ….so we can help you as soon as possible. We are already in contact with Paulo, to identify and solve the problem as soon as possible. We would like to apologize for the inconvenience and thank your for your patience. Best regards, Swisscom”

So here goes. My finger is now hovering over the button to post an article on Facebook about a Facebook post, about a telecommunications company that is probably delivering this Facebook post to your mobile phone. Hmmmm….

More on this: Paulo Coelho’s Facebook post