"Death where is thy sting"

[catgate]

What a pantomime it all is. I can understand Alanho clearing off to Tenerife for some respite.

I have just spent the last couple of hours wrestling with my patience and BT, and I am still not sure if any progress has been made.

As mentioned in previous despatches we are about 2½ miles from the exchange and are fed by an old underground cable, 1938/9 vintage. (Unbelievably, some of the farm feeder offshoots actually go through drainage ditches and when the water level is high they are submerged.)

Some time just before Christmas I realised that my download speed was down...again. I am on the BT “Up to 8 K” but the best has only ever been 3 K, and that was during the first weeks after I migrated to BT. It is more often in the 1.8-2 K range but it had dropped to around 1K. This was not the daily “homework” drop it was a general 24 hour thing.

This had occurred previously in March 2009, and after sending a message via the BT website asking for it to be looked into, it was corrected. I then received an email in April saying that it had been corrected.... well it had been put back into the 2 K range.

So, last night I writ them a little note again and sent it to the address on the above mentioned email I received from them. .......and promptly got it back with the information that it could not be delivered.

I then remembered that I had trodden this path before and the only way had been to go onto the BT website, log in and then use their “complaint system”. So I did that, or rather I tried to do that.

When I tried to log in it would not let me. Either my user name or password was unacceptable. At this point I remembered that this had happened last time and as a result I had to get a new password, which was the one I was now using. I tried the old password...just in case....and that resulted in the same refusal. I went to bed.

This morning I tried both of the above paragraphs again. BT get full mark for consistency...I got exactly what I had got last night.

Eventually I went to the BT Forgotten Password site and there fed in all the details required to get through the barriers and get a new password. BT consistency continued It would not recognise me. Three times it would not recognise me..so I went and looked in a mirror to see if I was still me. I was, and so I delved further into the site and eventually found a telephone number to be used if all else failed.

I find it odd that a company that supposes itself to be a leader in communications is always so “unobtainable” and hides itself behind so many screens.

I rang the number and I got what seemed to be a very pleasant helpful young lady who sounded to be from somewhere a long, long way above Hadrian's wall. (That pleased me because I felt I might have got Sanjeev or one of his sisters, and this always leaves me with very mixed feelings about the wisdom of this sort of thing.)

She gave me a hearing and then said she would connect me to a person who would deal with my problem. She switched me to another voice which must again have been from right up at the top (and may be over the sea) but this voice was recorded and gave me four options. At that my heart sank, and sank even further when, after I had pushed “number one” I found myself connected to Sanjeev.

He enquired how he could help me and I told him that I wanted to change my password so that I could then send a written complaint through the official channel about this slow download speed problem

He was pleasant enough, and full of the usual scripted fawning apologies and grovelling, and we went through the usual charade of questions and answers which always seem to be trying to prove that the fault is at the customers side of the BT box just inside the house.

After he finally had squeezed all the pips out of that he decided he would have to “check the line” and if I would allow it he would ring me back after he had done this, and would I desist from using the line for the next 15 minutes. I thought “ By gum he's going to have to get a move on, if he is going to get over here and test the line and be back in Bombay to ring me back in 15 minutes.”

In due course he rang back saying that he would like me to log on to something called http://speedtester.bt.com/ , which I did. After farting about with this for a while it appeared that it would not play with Firefox running under Ubuntu, although it claimed to be happy with Firefox under Fedora.. (I suspect it might have been a Java problem but I was getting too weary to care). So he would disappear again and ring me back in due course.

About 20 minutes later he rang and said ,”Vell your line iss slow. I vill get it reported for you right avay.”

I held my tongue. To say I had told him this an hour or so ago would not have furthered the cause.

“Is dere anyting else I can do for you?” said he. So I said,” Yes you could deal with my password problem.”

His department, of course, was not the department to deal with this, but he would pass me over to the department concerned. Not only that but he would give me their number so that I could ring them myself if the queue was very long.

I was transferred, and I heard the usual queue noises for about 15 minutes, and than uttered the usual oaths and prayers to bring down the wrath of someone or other on the heads of those who see this farce as a “service” and hung up.....wild and exhausted.

After another quarter of an hour the telephone rang and it was Sanjeev again, “Der is still a long queue shall I pass it over to you?” He passed it over and sure enough I got queueing noises, for about ten minutes and then it went dead.

So apart from a promise to get someone to look at my line I am not one bit better off for all the time I have wasted playing silly games with the country's leading communications company. My only hope is that, as they gradually slide further and further down the pan, they are not bought out by Sanjeev and his sisters, though I suspect they might do a better job.... but unintelligibly.

[rong]

Good day then, always good for you retired people to have something to keep you of the streets ;)

[Gandalph]

I see you have had the usual load of garbage from BT. I've never suffered myself but I know quite a few who have. :(