Never ending story

At the risk of boring the gentle reader…

I find that I now have a terrible compulsion to continue my explication of the train-wreck that is our current contretemps with British Telecom over our broken phone line and non-existent broadband – from which I am apparently unable to avert my attention!

Sorry about that…

After Openreach’s total failure last Friday either to show up during the specified five hour period that I waited for them, or to inform me that they were not actually coming after all… nothing happened! Though they had now identified that the fault was outside the property – somewhere between the cabinet in the street and the neighbouring telegraph pole – they declined to do anything about it.

When nothing had also been done by Tuesday I felt it my grim duty to contact BT anew to demand to know why not. I tried to call the fault contact number.

BT has a fancy-pants automated answering system. I have no idea for whose benefit this is meant to be, but it clearly is not the customer’s. It works like this:

• The customer calls BT. The robot answers and asks the customer to state – in a few words – the nature of the enquiry, adding – as a helpful example – “to order a new circuit?” (note: not to ‘complain about BT’s inexcusable failure to fix a long-standing fault!’)
• The customer – who has by now been through this process a number of times – responds with a pithily sarcastic observation implying complete lack of confidence in BT’s ability to hit a barn door with a banjo!
• BT’s automated system magically interprets this correctly as a request for an update on a fault and asks the customer to type the number of the phone concerned on the keypad.
• The user does so – carefully!
• The system totally fails to recognise the number, declares that since this is not a BT number they are unable to assist, and terminates the call abruptly!!

After several attempts this particular customer decided to try an oblique approach instead. I called again, but this time answered the first question with – “I’d like to order a new circuit”. As if by magic I was connected to a real-live person who sweetly enquired how he might help. “You can connect me to someone in your faults department” – I snarled – “without forcing me through your wretched automated system!”…

The faults department operative – speaking from the far side of the planet – did not know the answer to my plaintive questions but promised to call me back. “Use my office number” – I pleaded – “as there is no mobile signal in our building”. Naturally they called the mobile instead and left a voicemail which I found later when I left the building to go home. The message informed me – brightly – that the fault had been ‘escalated’. Not fixed – of course! That would be too much to ask.

When I checked the fault log on the BT website again later I discovered that this ‘escalation’ had apparently empowered BT to push back the target fix date to next Friday – more than five weeks after the fault was first logged!

An email plopped into my inbox. It was a telephone bill – from BT. Not only do they want to charge us a line-rental fee for a connection that has not worked in more than a month, but closer inspection showed that they also want to make us pay for a number of calls to the USA that we didn’t make – from the period that our line was crossed with someone else’s!

I called the far side of the world again.

The bright young man promised that once the fault was fixed (displaying an optimism that I, for one, found hard to summon) the bill would be adjusted accordingly and that we would not be asked to pay for this absence of service.

He then – shamelessly – tried to sell me a BT Broadband service!!!

If BT reward their telesales staff for chutzpah – this young man must be raking it in…

…Our phone line still doesn’t work…