Getting Sick of This Now...

I’m about as sick of writing about my current problems with BT as anyone foolish enough to read this blog must be hearing about them. But it really does seem never ending. Obviously, as I predicted, the line wasn’t fixed yesterday, so I’m still without a phone or broadband for the foreseeable future. Which meant another wasted morning talking to BT via their chat app (they really don’t want to engage with their customers directly), getting nowhere. Not only did I have to go through the whole sorry saga again with yet another different agent but I also had to raise yet another complaint, This was because the reported fault had, apparently, been ‘dealt’ with. Despite this, I still had no service and was now being told that it wouldn’t be fixed until Friday! At which point I told them that this was unacceptable, as they had had since the 21^st to fix yet, despite assurances only yesterday that it would be fixed by the end of the day, BT had, apparently, done nothing. Which is where things started to turn even more surreal than usual. After being escalated to speaking to a manager, I was told that the original fault had been fixed, but the fix hadn’t worked! So, in other words, it hadn’t been fixed - unless you are BT, in which case a failed fix is considered a success. 

As a result, I’m now on a ‘new’ fault, which will be fixed, allegedly, by Friday. Of course, this makes it look as if they fixed the original problem ‘on schedule’’ –  something they will doubtless use to massage their stats with OFCOM. Interestingly, this time around, I have a text from Openreach telling me that an engineer will be assigned to the fault – something I didn’t get the first time around, reinforcing my suspicion that, in reality, nothing was actually done to rectify the fault. But none of this gets me back online. Indeed, it simply puts me back to square one. Which is par for the course with BT. The long term solution is to ditch BT – but I can’t do that until they repair the line. Going to fibre might help, nut my current ISP (who aren’t the problem here) don’t offer a VOIP option, so that would mean either losing my landline (which I still use) or having the added complication of switching the phone to a third party VOIP provider. So it could well be that I’m going to have to start looking for a new ISP who offers both FTTC (I don’t want more holes drilled in my walls to accommodate FTTP) and VOIP at a reasonable price (and which has decent customer service). Ultimately, though, I’d still be reliant upon Openreach to actually fix any problems – but some service providers, it seems, are more adept than BT at getting them to do their job in a reasonable time scale. In the meantime, I’m reliant on expensive mobile data (not to mention variable reception) to stay online. I’ve got a new story due to be put up on The Sleaze tomorrow and a podcast to post on Onsug before the end of the month. The story will probably be feasible – posting it on the site shouldn’t require much data. But the podcast looks unlikely, due to the amount of data required to upload the MP3 files. Thanks for nothing, BT.