[Doofy]

So, here's a little story for you hippies. Enjoy.

18th December, noon (ish). Purchase of house has gone through, money handed over, it's a done deal.
Telephone British Telecom and order a phone line for the new house.
Chappie tells me it'll be operational by the 21st December. At this point, takes my mobile number in case of problems.
Like an idiot, I choose not to top up my mobile with credits (requires Internet).

21st December.
No phone line.
Phone BT: "Where's my phone line?"
BT: "It'll be the 7th January".

Fantastic. Christmas with no phone or Internet. Or TV. And 50p odd (that's about five minutes talk time) on my mobile (it's usually strictly for car breakdown use - I hate mobiles).

7th January, 4pm (ish).
Since I don't have a phone line or any mobile credit, I get Momma to phone BT and ask them where my phone line is.
"There's a technical problem with the exchange. It'll be sorted within 48 hours".

7th January, 4:30pm (ish).
Whoo. Phone line is operational. I'm highly impressed that BT's dedicated team of engineers swooped down on the exchange and sorted the problem out in such a record time.

Or maybe they just forgot to connect the line and needed reminding.

8th January, noon (ish).
Phones BT: "Hello, I'd like my master socket moving. Afternoons only please, I'm a rock star and don't do mornings. Any afternoon you like. Thanks.".
"OK, we'll send an engineer. Afternoon of Tuesday the 9th do you sir?"
"Great. Thanks for your help".

8th January, 2 pm (ish).
Text message to my mobile stating that the appointment for the 9th pm has been rescheduled to the 11th am, phone this number if unsuitable.
Phones number... Gets a flowchart monkey somewhere in India. I don't want India, they tell me, I want the UK - so I'm transferred to the UK faults department. Friendly chap there tells me that the appointment is still for the 9th pm. Sorted.

9th January, ridiculous'o'clock (OK, OK, about 8 am).
Phone call to my mobile from some woman in India stating that my appointment for the 9th pm has been rescheduled to the 11th am. I told her I don't do mornings. I probably also threatened her entire extended family with disembowelment or something. I don't know - I was asleep, I don't do mornings.

9th January, 2 pm (ish).
No sign of any engineers. Happen to glance at my mobile, notice that there's three missed calls between noon and 2 pm, all from BT.
Decide to investigate.
"Hello BT, what's happening, what's all these calls, where's your engineer?".
Of course, the call starts out with the flowchart monkeys in India.
I eventually get through to some chick (who obviously wanted me, obviously) in customer services in the UK. Tells me that the appointment has indeed been rescheduled. I explain my no mornings situation and ask her to remove my mobile number from their system. She books me with an appointment on the 14th, pm. Good, good, we're getting somewhere.

9th January, 3 pm (ish).
Text message to my mobile stating that the appointment for the 14th pm has been rescheduled to the 11th am phone this number if unsuitable...
Phones number... Gets a flowchart monkey in India, as expected. She tells me that her computer is showing that my appointment is on the 14th pm. I ask to be put through to customer services in the UK. She says she hasn't got the authority and simply keeps repeating what's written on the flowchart in front of her. I ask to speak to her supervisor. He says his computer shows my appointment is on the 11th am. I ask him to put me through to customer services in the UK.
Get some chap in "options department" (!?) and explain the whole sorry saga to him and ask him if BT's computer is fsked or running Windows or something. At this point I might have mentioned that if they turn up on the 11th am they won't be able to get in, they'll still charge me the callout charge which I will then refuse to pay which will lead to their removing my phone and taking me to court which would then result in their having to pay me so much in damages that they'll have to sell their grannies' underwear to pay for it all. He pootles off to his supervisor for a bit and then comes back and tells me that my appointment is on the 14th.

Why is it so bloody hard just to get a phone socket moved?

On the other hand, I just phoned the LPG gas supply company (the house is off the gas mains) and they were so good they damn near asked me something like "does sir require some canoodlings with the hot secretary in accounts while he waits? And some grapes?".

Moral of the story? Monopolies (i.e. BT) must die. Along with foreign call centres.

[Dakar the Fourth]

Quit spamming the Lounge! Uhh... I mean welcome back!

[richwig83]

BT are one of the most useless companies in existence!!! Tried to charge me a disconnection fee of 250quid because i was moving...

... don't get me started on foreign call centres!!

Like you say, they should not be allowed to have a monopoly on phoneline installations!!

Hope you get it sorted out eventually,

Rich

[osiris]

Yeah, it's been a while, welcome back!

I thought your Capitalist pig self loved Monopolies. Now you're starting to worry me.

[Chuckit]

Wow, and I thought our phone company was useless. I feel like an ingrate now.

[Peter]

BT may suck but they're 10x better than NTL.

[Dakar the Fourth]

Acronyms! I want more acronyms!

[Doofy]

Wait. When did Chuck go blue? And Peter go yellow?

WTF is going on around here?!?

[Mrjinglesusa]

Why are you calling everyone hippies? Not just this thread, but your other dribblings in the lounge as well?

[Shaddim]

Originally Posted by Mrjinglesusa 

Why are you calling everyone hippies? Not just this thread, but your other dribblings in the lounge as well?

He's always referred to the Lefty wankers as "hippies".

[Peter]

Originally Posted by Doofy 

Wait. When did Chuck go blue? And Peter go yellow?

WTF is going on around here?!?

and Kevin got banned.

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by Doofy 

Moral of the story? Monopolies (i.e. BT) must die. Along with foreign call centres.

What about former monopolies like the Greek Telephone Company (OTE)?

Your story sounds suspiciously similar to what my father went through to establish a new phone line this past September in his house in Greece. Except for the flowchart monkeys. The Greek ones are still in Greece. (Sidenote: Can you imagine a Greek call center in India? If they can't get English right...)

Flowchart monkeys.

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by Peter 

and Kevin got banned.

That's not news. Kevin had been banned before. What's news is that Kevin got permabanned. (a la good ol' Ca$h)

[brassplayersrock²]

not just banned.... PERMA banned.... oohhh ahhh. welcome back doofy! glad to see a friendly face around here

*shakes angry fist at person man

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Doofy 

Wait. When did Chuck go blue? And Peter go yellow?

WTF is going on around here?!?

Well, y'know, Peter insulted my wife's honor, I challenged him to a duel in the town square, yada yada yada.

[brassplayersrock²]

yes, it was very epic. it was the typing heard around the world

[besson3c]

Doofy: why do you always call me a hippy? I think you're a hippy.

[Dakar the Fourth]

Originally Posted by Peter 

and Kevin got banned.

And I morphed from an ugly duckling to a homely goose.
That is to say I evolved into my next account.

[MacosNerd]

Originally Posted by Dakar the Fourth 

Acronyms! I want more acronyms!

TFB you're SOL

[Dakar the Fourth]

For companies you SOB!

[brassplayersrock²]

Originally Posted by Dakar the Fourth 

And I morphed from an ugly duckling to a homely goose.
That is to say I evolved into my next account.

i'm not quite sure about that first part

[Dakar the Fourth]

Thanks for you participation.

[brassplayersrock²]

anytime dakara

[Dakar the Fourth]

dakara hahahaha that is so funny and original. Do you actually write any material yourself?
Also, it doesn't apply anymore.

[analogika]

Doofy:

All, and I mean ALL, telecom companies are, in a truly fundamental way, of the devil.
It's industry-inherent and just a rule of nature.

Switching to a competing company is merey a temporary alleviation of symptoms, until *that* company's crappiness starts hitting you full-force the first chance it gets.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Dakar the Fourth 

dakara hahahaha that is so funny and original. Do you actually write any material yourself?
Also, it doesn't apply anymore.

I woulda gone with Dakaria.

[Andrew Stephens]

Well I quite "like" BT. For a given value of like.

They get nearly all the things they do for me right and their broadband service is very reliable.

AND, although everyone in the UK is on "up to 8Mb" speed, the national average is a disgraceful 2MB but we average out at around 7.5. I can see the exchange from my window mind.

[Dakar the Fourth]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

I woulda gone with Dakaria.

Sounds like a bad sci-fi world. But the point is, the Dakar² account whose address read as Dakara is no longer being used. If anything, I should be calling him brassplayersrocka, since his account profile page now reads like that since he decided to borrow my idea.

[brassplayersrock²]

only imitate the good ideas, not the bad.

[Doofy]

Originally Posted by analogika 

All, and I mean ALL, telecom companies are, in a truly fundamental way, of the devil.
It's industry-inherent and just a rule of nature.

Aye.

Originally Posted by analogika 

Switching to a competing company is merey a temporary alleviation of symptoms, until *that* company's crappiness starts hitting you full-force the first chance it gets.

Part of the problem is that you can't go to a competing company. If you live outside the cities (i.e. outside NTL cable coverage) and you want Internet, you have no choice but to go BT. They're a monopoly which controls all of the infrastructure.

And, as you say, are evil.

[brassplayersrock²]

you could always send your bunny warriors over to them and demand that you get what is needed

[Mastrap]

I've got a couple of Bell Canada stories that would feel right at home in this thread. Oh yes.

[brassplayersrock²]

please share

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Doofy 

Part of the problem is that you can't go to a competing company. If you live outside the cities (i.e. outside NTL cable coverage) and you want Internet, you have no choice but to go BT. They're a monopoly which controls all of the infrastructure.

And, as you say, are evil.

As I also said, it wouldn't make a difference, anyway.

Choose your brand of Suck, or don't bother. If you can't, just stay put and worry about things you CAN change for the better.

[Buckaroo]

Phones BT: "Hello, I'd like my master socket moving.

???????

I'm not sure what a master socket is, and why you want it mobile.

Does everyone over there talk like this? My first thought was Craftsman Socket, but then after reading to the end, I believe you want the phone jack moved? Am I right?

[brassplayersrock²]

Not sure if this'll help doofy, but I found this on another site

It would cost under £20 including the cable if you know someone who is handy with such work.

BT will charge a vastly larger sum...:-)

You can buy a telephone extension cable for around a fiver to run from the main socket (hide it under the carpet or skirting board) and a data type for broadband could be run in the same way. It should cost £7.59 for a 10 metre BB data cable.

Don't forget that with broadband you will require a splitter (ADSL filter) for the main socket; a phone extension cable could be used from a double adapter.

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by analogika 

Doofy:

All, and I mean ALL, telecom companies are, in a truly fundamental way, of the devil.
It's industry-inherent and just a rule of nature.

Switching to a competing company is merey a temporary alleviation of symptoms, until *that* company's crappiness starts hitting you full-force the first chance it gets.

100% agreed. It's really a question of choosing the evil that suits you best *if* you can choose at all!

Welcome back Doofy! This is still hippieland. A few rotations in the crew and a few bans, but other than that, it's the same old loveable nude-beach and free-loving colony as it was before Christmas.

V

[badidea]

Originally Posted by analogika 

All, and I mean ALL, telecom companies are, in a truly fundamental way, of the devil.
It's industry-inherent and just a rule of nature.

Switching to a competing company is merey a temporary alleviation of symptoms, until *that* company's crappiness starts hitting you full-force the first chance it gets.

That's probably written in the constitution.

So far I'm quite lucky with my current telecom company though.
The worst that happened in the last 6 years was that I didn't have internet for about 10 days, because they insisted that the problem was on my side and I should call their computer support (which wasn't free of charge of course).
I told them that their support doesn't know as much as I do about how to setup my Mac and that the problem is definitely on their side!
I did that every 2 days...
...until I finally got someone on the line who accepted my complaints and informed the technical departement - then they called me and admitted that the port, which I was connected to, was broken...
I never received a payback for those 10 days of course!

The problems I had with my former telecom company could fill the next 5 pages.
Germans know which company I mean!

[Oisín]

What about former monopolies like the Greek Telephone Company (OTE)?

Ahh, that’s what it is. I’ve always sort of wondered why just about anyone Greek has an @otenet.gr e-mail address. Now I know.



I’m quite a new customer at my telecom company, so I haven’t got much to bitch about yet. Only thing they did wrong when installing my line (phone + ADSL, supposedly a 20/2 Mbit line, realistically more like 6 Mbit/800 Kbit, though it peaks above that sometimes) was be slow.

And when they sent me the confirmation letter, it read something like, “Your line will be activated by 14 November 2007. If you’ve opted for the technician-aided install, please make sure you’re home during business hours on that day. Our technician will call the mobile phone number you’ve given, and you will be expected to let him in about 30 minutes later. Failure to do so will result in being charged a callout charge”, etc. Only problem was that this letter was mailed on 16 November and reached me on 19 November, i.e., five days after the technician would have been there, had I opted for the technician-aided install. And it’s not like they didn’t have time enough to get it right, either: they’d taken nearly two months to get the line set up and activated in the first place. Great planning.

[vexborg]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

Ahh, that’s what it is. I’ve always sort of wondered why just about anyone Greek has an @otenet.gr e-mail address. Now I know.



I’m quite a new customer at my telecom company, so I haven’t got much to bitch about yet. Only thing they did wrong when installing my line (phone + ADSL, supposedly a 20/2 Mbit line, realistically more like 6 Mbit/800 Kbit, though it peaks above that sometimes) was be slow.

And when they sent me the confirmation letter, it read something like, “Your line will be activated by 14 November 2007. If you’ve opted for the technician-aided install, please make sure you’re home during business hours on that day. Our technician will call the mobile phone number you’ve given, and you will be expected to let him in about 30 minutes later. Failure to do so will result in being charged a callout charge”, etc. Only problem was that this letter was mailed on 16 November and reached me on 19 November, i.e., five days after the technician would have been there, had I opted for the technician-aided install. And it’s not like they didn’t have time enough to get it right, either: they’d taken nearly two months to get the line set up and activated in the first place. Great planning.

Are you by any chance talking about TDC here? If so, I wish you good luck with them...

[Oisín]

Good God no. I’m not quite optimistic enough to give TDC the benefit of any doubt.

No, I’m talking about Perspektiv Bredbånd.

(Hvad laver du i øvrigt fem kilometer ude midt i Sejerø Bugt?)

[Graycat]

Gotta love BT! good for a laugh if not for anything else lol

I can sympathise though - we were moving one of our office from some run down shack of a building to the other side of the city centre into some brand spanking new facilities. Four months before the move I placed the phone, isdn and sdsl line orders etc. Phone lines went in fine with the isdn lines following suit on schedule. skip on to two months after we'd moved in and the SDSL link was just being sorted due to a catalogue of issues with BT - ran the line wrong, redid it but ran it to the wrong exchange, rerouted it to the proper only to find out there was no capacity, route to a third exchange only for the exchange to be up and down like a yo-yo for tree weeks! it actually got to the point where we had our own complaint manager assigned and we new the complaints team and half the city engineers by first name. lol

[ntsc]

some of you might enjoy this...

YouTube - Marcus Brigstocke vs BT broadband

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by ntsc 

some of you might enjoy this...

YouTube - Marcus Brigstocke vs BT broadband

yes that's very funny. So's his rant on religion.

YouTube - Marcus Brigstocke's '3 Abrahamic Faiths' Rant

He's had a long standing hatred of David Blaine too. And who can blame him.

[Doofy]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

???????

I'm not sure what a master socket is, and why you want it mobile.

Does everyone over there talk like this?

Yes. We call stuff by its name. We're weird like that.

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

My first thought was Craftsman Socket, but then after reading to the end, I believe you want the phone jack moved? Am I right?

Originally Posted by brassplayersrock²

Not sure if this'll help doofy, but I found this on another site

I'll take these two together.

In the UK, the phone line tends to come into domestic properties at one point - through the wall into the master socket (I'd post a pic of one but you try doing a Google image search while you're on dialup. ). Further sockets - extensions - can then be branched off this main socket. These extensions are what the info Brass posted is on about - you can get BT to come install your extensions (expensive) or just go buy the cable and boxes from any electrical retailer (cheap).

However, while anyone can move or install extension sockets, only BT can move the master socket. An option would have been to simply install a couple of extension sockets, but since I'm (as usual) on the very edge of being able to receive DSL I need the master socket moving to the room where the computers are - extension cables/sockets are really quite bad at attenuating the signal and dramatically screwing up your bandwidth.
I figure I'm going to be lucky if I get 512/256 (k) off the master socket - the guy who sold me the house was getting 128/384 (but was on ADSL Max rather than old school ADSL as per my service) through his extensions.
No extensions for me - I'm on cordless - but I do need the master socket in a room where there's AC supply and Mac cuddliness rather than (basically) the guest crapper where it is at the moment (yes, that's right, some fool saw fit to put the master socket in a small room with no electricity sockets).

Latest news? About two hours ago BT tried to reschedule my monday pm appointment to tomorrow morning. For the third time.

[Dakar the Fourth]

Sounds like you're their only PM appointment and they want out bad.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Dakar the Fourth 

Sounds like you're their only PM appointment and they want out bad.

More like everyone wants P.M. appointments, but they’re completely free tomorrow morning.

[Dakar the Fourth]

I hate you.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Dakar the Fourth 

I hate you.

Oh.

Well, I guess you won’t be wanting this key lime pie I made you, then?

*tear*

[Dakar the Fourth]

I don't eat pie actually.