Today, I reschedule a conference call – again – because of BT’s rank incompetence. And they want to sell me broadband! … But this doesn’t begin to compare with Kelly’s nightmare
“My Mum was going in for her second spinal operation to have a full disc removed due to a trapped nerve. When she was released from hospital my Dad had to leave for Munich on business, so I was left to take care of her.
I was managing a small, struggling pub in another village, and couldn’t take too much time off to stay home, so she was going to spend hours alone each day in the middle of nowhere – the cottage is in a teeny tiny village with laughable mobile phone reception.
The day I was going back to work I picked up the phone to call my Dad and let him know everything was ok … only to be greeted by silence. No dial tone.
I walked down the road to call BT and find out what was going on. I was greeted with an enthusiastic “You told us you were moving house, so we’ve disconnected all your phone and internet lines.”
I immediately responded “ We have had the same phone line in this house for 8 years, and I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”
The BT clerk then reiterated that they had a message on their system that we should have all our communications shut down because we were moving house. I explained again that this was absolutely not the case, and then asked who had given them this information.
They couldn’t tell me that. I told them this was a huge misunderstanding, that we very much needed the phone line, and it needed to be reconnected immediately.
“We can’t do that.”
I was a little piqued. “Why the f**k not? You just disconnected it with a click of a button, reconnect it!”
The moron at the other end said: “An engineer needs to be sent out to your house to make sure it’s suitable for a phone line and internet from us.”
At this point I was at a loss.
“You know it’s suitable, you literally just disconnected a full package from our home on a whim, you’ve been providing “service” to us for nearly a decade. Reconnect us immediately.”
I began to panic. Here I was, about to leave my Mum unable to even sit up of her own accord, in a house with no phone, no internet, and no mobile signal. If something happened to her she would be totally and utterly stranded until I came home later that evening.
I couldn’t stop imagining her injuring herself. And what if someone was to break in? She was completely helpless.
When I explained this to the woman on the phone her response was (and I swear to God) “Well that’s not really very likely now, is it?”
If she had been within arm’s reach I would have throttled her.
“We can’t do that I’m afraid, we can send an engineer out to you in 3-5 days time to set it up for you.”
At this point I lost my rag, and immediately demanded to speak to manager, who was even less helpful. It took nearly 3 hours on the phone to get them to agree to send an Engineer out (not until the next morning), and needless to say I did not make it into work that day.
And that is why I hate BT.”
***
Well, after that I feel a bit ashamed, really.
My only problem is that I’ve been waiting to do a phone interview with Michael Senoff in the US for a week and they’ve done f**k-all.
Except a) send me a letter suggesting I try their broadband and b) – quite laughable – send me the transcript of a highly unsatisfactory phone conversation where some guy fails utterly to explain to Kelly why they have done sod-all.
If you ring my number you get a message saying the customer is aware of the situation and they are doing all they can.
Or in plain English, nothing – about all they are good for.
Mind you, I think they have just pissed away millions to get the right to show some sport on their bloody broadband
So they do all the wrong things right and all the right things wrong.
How Kelly condensed that episode into such a concise story is quite impressive. It doesn’t reflect the anguish of the calls to BT ‘advisors’ who are reading from a script and have no authority to deviate from it.
I’m not sure I could relay my other BT and Vodafone stories without an encyclopaedic volume….
I actually feel sorry for the poor buggers on the phone. They suffer from bad management. The bastards at the top should be forced to man the phones.
I am an engineer in telecoms(nothing to do with BT) .
The incompetence of BT in engineering ,is breathtaking.
The morons that call them selves management have culled the experienced engineering staff and replaced them with incompetent idiots.
Consequently the internet doesn’t work properly ,when technically the concept of the design of the internet was to provide a literally bomb proof communication infrastructure.
The phone infrastructure is now a total cock up ,run by the same idiots (open reach) .
Nothing works as it should.
They have just paid £10.bn for EE ,because they could see the threat to their monopoly with 4G providing faster broadband than a direct wired connection.
Because they haven’t a clue they paid £9bn too much ,because if they new what they were doing they could have rolled out 4G or similar for a fraction of the cost.