The Interruption Continues

So, am I back online properly? Of course not. British Telecom still haven’t dealt with the fault on my phone line which is, obviously, also blocking my access to my ADSL broadband. It was supposed to be resolved by today, but the line is still dead. Now, BT have claimed that they have only said that it would be fixed by the end of today. I took this to mean the end of the working day, (as most normal people would). They, however, say that it means the literal end of the day at 23:59 and that the line will be repaired by then. Hmmm. I’ve heard all of this before – twenty odd years ago, when I needed my BT line reactivated after I’d had enough of NTL/Virgin Media, I went through the same nonsense of being given times when the line would be live, only for them to pass with no connection. BT’s response would be to pull another arbitrary deadline for activation out of thin air – which, again, would pass without anything happening. After over a week of this, I finally lost my temper with their customer service in a phone call, (the trigger was being told that they couldn’t keep me up to date because they didn’t have a valid contact number – well, obviously, they hadn’t connected it and I was having to use a public pay phone to contact them). 

So, do I really think that my phone and broadband will magically come back before midnight? Of course not. Do I really think that they have people working outside of normal hours to reconnect me? Of course not. They’ve had since just after seven o’clock last Wednesday morning, when the fault was reported and logged, to deal with this, but apparently couldn’t be bothered doing anything until today – when they apparently still haven’t done anything. Odds are that I’m going to be wasting yet more time tomorrow trying to get some sense out of the clown show that is BT’s customer service. I’ve been here before, multiple times – BT simply won’t deal with faults in their equipment where there isn’t any money in it for them. If it is your equipment at fault, fine, they’ll be there like a shot as they can bill you for the engineer’s visit and repairs. Otherwise, you have to continually harass and harry them if you want to have any chance of getting your problem fixed. But they’ll try to fob you off with false promises at every opportunity. Of course, there’s still the matter of the compensation I’m owed under OFCOM regulations – BT have been remarkably silent on this subject, (if a fault isn’t fixed within 48 hours, the customer is entitled to compensation for every day they are without service – which is three, nearly four, days for me, so far). In the meantime, I’m reduced to minimal online activity via very expensive mobile data and no streaming TV services at all.