Hi, Phil,
Thank you for sharing your experience with the community.
I must say that I found your post very well written and I can sympathise entirely. It is indeed like a comedy show. Unfortunately, with such large corporations, especially when contractors are hired to carry out work on the company's behalf, miscommunication across departments seems to be becoming more and more common.
I find Telstra staff quite helpful most of the time but their problem is coordination in my experience. I remember one time when I had to validate my identity three times across different departments on the same interaction.
I do hope that your issue is sorted out swiftly, and I'm certain that any automatically generated charges for a service that isn't yet installed will be waived if your raise your concerns with Telstra's customer service team.
Best of luck with it.