Alright, BT, now I’m mad
Mar 18th, 2010 by handolio
One of the things about being a freelance technology journalist is that things like a telephone line and the internet are, you know, useful.
Imagine my joy then, on discovering last night that my phone line was misbehaving. It has subsequently died.
I can’t really begin to convey my contempt for BT just now, but hey – I’m going to try.
First off, I’d like to congratulate them for a period of just over seven months during which I was neither disconnected by mistake, nor were my calls excessively noisy, nor did my line spontaneously fail. Credit where it’s due.
But regular readers may recall that for the first nearly-three-years of living here I did experience noisy calls and very slow broadband.
Then, about seven months back, my line went dead. It actually wasn’t the first time (see link above) so I didn’t panic until, when I tried to report a fault, I wasn’t allowed to. It turned out there wasn’t a fault, because I’d been cut off.
It’s a difficult one to follow, this. When I first moved in my dad had helped me out by setting up some of my accounts. This had included the phone. Almost three years later he moved, from an entirely unconnected address to another entirely unconnected address – having his own problems with BT in the process, I should add.
That was the time my phone line died. It turned out that despite no request having been made, my line had been stopped along with dad’s. I subsequently discovered that mine had, BT say, been in my dad’s name all along – despite the distinctly me-specific information on all of the bills me-not-he had paid in the meantime.
Massive pain in the cock
This happened just before I went away for 10 days, and by the time I’d returned my broadband had been stopped (BE couldn’t provide it without a phone line to provide it on), I’d been reconnected with a different phone number and it was down to me to get BT to reunite me with the old one. I was also left to restore my internet access for which, understandably, I was charged.
I had intended to pass this cost on to BT along with a bill for the several pounds’ worth of mobile phone calls I ran up trying to resolve the issue, but life’s too short. So, it seems, is the period for which BT is able to maintain an acceptable level of service.
I am now properly fucked off. I have no words of wisdom to offer, but I do have a question: Given that we can buy our ADSL where we like yet it mostly gets into our homes over BT equipment, why exactly is it that we must still rent our landlines from BT and not, say, our broadband providers?
In fact, why do we still need a landline in 2010? What’s the reason I can’t just ditch my phone altogether, pay O2 just to provide broadband over what was once the landline, and use skype and my mobile as necessary?
Hmm?
I fucking hate BT, I really really do. Years ago when at school an ex senior BT exec. told us that he’d left because he couldn’t stand to see them drag the technological development of our national comms. infrastructure through the shit any longer. This is critical national infrastructure and should be treated as such.
We either go the way of Finland and let BT’s shitty old copper wires rot in the woodwork and go all GSM-on-their-incompetent-asses, or…erm…I don’t fucking know…find a way of making fibre optic cables on-the-cheap out of call centre workers’ tears, bleeding toss-filled ears and the ground up remains of star and f*#*#ng hash buttons? Do these people bottle incompetence and force an army of illiterate, unwashed twats to gulp concentrated shots of it every morning before giving them courses on how to fuck-up the lives of everyday Jim McTelephone?
I’m so happy that I no longer live in the UK where piss-poor customer service is an acceptable part of daily life. Fuck BT. Fuck your call centres and your rusting pissy network of C.19th ‘wires’. Reconnect Handolio, sort out broadband for my Dad and then fuck off in to the ether of the internet so we can delete you, delete the cache, remove any trace of your existence from search engine archives, overwrite every bit containing a ‘B’ and a ‘T’ on every server in the world with 0s and pretend your incompetent organisation never fucking existed.
You wankers.
Other more highly advanced countries, such as Australia, NZ and Canada offer a service called naked adsl, which gives you acess to the porn internet, as well as the non-porn internet, without requiring a phone line. That’s what we need here.