Phown Goal
Since I have a nice word number for my phone (027 2 DEBIAN) I wanted to keep it when I left Catalyst so I went to a Vodafone dealer to ask them to change the name on the account. It seems that this is not easy. I actually ended up going to two different Vodafone dealers to try and arrange for this, but they both seemed to be telling me it would be expensive and complicated, and I would lose service for up to a week in the middle of the changeover.
What is relatively easy is to sign up with a different phone company and port my number across to them, so that's what's happening. Hopefully all of the number portability problems I encountered last year are gone now!
I suspect that the Vodafone sales staff were trying to discourage me, because they sell on commission, and there's no commission in moving a phone to a different account.
Vodafone dealers
Personally I would suggest a lack of training of Vodafone shops staff.
For a similar need, I (a) first got a negative answer from a shop, (b) called the Vodafone hotline and got the answer it was feasible (as I thought), (c) went back to (another) shop and tell them the hotline said me that it was ok to transform a prepaid phone number into a subscriber account and (d) suddenly the shop said it was ok.
Next I asked this shop about how I can group four individual subscribers invoices into one single invoice (paying at once for four lines) and... I think I've to call again the hotline ! ;-)