Product Support?

My first rule of blogging is that I never blog about work, but today I will make an exception after coming across two of the best named departments ever!

I was with a client and waiting for BT to respond to a call. After some time on the phone to a support engineer, I was told that the call was to be sent to the Inconclusive Team. What do these guys do? Do they do anything?

If you have a problem and nobody else can tell you what it is, and if you can find them, maybe you can call the Inconclusive Team!

But it didn't stop there. A further call from BT informed me that they have now moved the call to the Poor Performance Problem Department (I guess they refer to themselves as the PPPD). Someone suggested that a word be added to the start of that name, a word that rhymes with 'this').

Anyway, it looks like the call is stuck with the PPPD for now, so I'll wait and see what happens.

In the meantime, another company has been teaching me how to play the game. You see, I have documentation for a process that needs to be run on a database we have, but I need some help with a part of it, so I e-mailed customer support and asked them to help me with pages 17 & 18 (I think it was). They asked me to e-mail them an electronic copy of the documentation so that they could know what I was on about. I told them that I didn't have a copy of that but gave them all the details I could of the document. Not good enough.

So, I logged another call with the same company. I logged a call saying that I'd lost the documentation for the database process and would they be able to send me another copy. They sent it to me and I sent it back to the person who needed it.

Sheesh! I thought I was bad, but this takes the cookie!

Still No Landline

BT still haven't got me connected. I'm still on hold for hours. Nobody seems to know what's going on. I'm paying for the service.

Just How Much Does BT Suck?

Today, I decided to set about the task of working out how much BT sucks.

It's somewhere between 'helluva lot' and 'more than a big sucky thing that has more suck than an overenthusiastic vacuum cleaner who thiniks he's about to be made redundant by his boss on whom it has a man-crush'.

Last week, I asked BT to give me a telephone service in return for some money. Unfortunately, while they understand perfectly well the concept of money, they don't appear to grasp the essentials of service. In fact, trying to get BT to activate my landline is harder than registering a Freedom Input Bluetooth Keyboard (oh, the irony that Bluetooth is often written 'BT')!

BT told me last week that it weould take a week but it would be active by Monday... Today.

It's not.

They sent me a text telling me to call them if it is not active by 19:00. I did but gave up after an hour of being told that my call is important and that they always have a lot of calls on a Monday so I may want to call back Tuesday.

(Here's a radical idea; if you know you always get a lot of calls on a Monday, get more staff in on a Monday. I know, crazy idea eh? I must be so whacky or something!)

After waiting an hour, I thought 'stuff this' and went for a walk. I was fed up using my free minutes trying to get hold of a telephone company that considers itself to be 'world class'.

I went for a walk and tried a public phone box. I waited and waited and decided to just leave it there, on hold. When someone finally does respond, they'll get as much sense as I have.

I'm not asking anyone to put a rocket into space, just to get my phone working without turning it into a bitter blog entry.

As it is, anybody who tries to phone me will get an Engaged tone. Nice.

Maybe it's a Welsh thing, that Welsh telecomms engineers don't know what telephones do and that the irritating 'brrrrrrr' sound that was coming down the line before was a sign that something was wrong so he 'made it better' by cutting the nasty cable.

Do I sound bitter? I've only waited a week for something that should take a few minutes. I've only agreed to pay for something I'm not getting. I'm only depending on a medium of communication that's as reliable as an elephant's needle threading skills.

I don't know what potty-brained moron decided that winding up the ciustomers like this is a good idea, but whoever it is, I hope their nose falls off and that they wear glasses.