Dave Burrows – Tech / iPhone Blog – Technical Evangelist

Sorry but here comes a big rant….I’ve been having problems with my internet connection from BT for the past two weeks. I should add that I’m in the UK, BT stands for “British Telecom”, and UK residents are British.

So enough is enough after two weeks of sporadic internet connection problems which come and go as quickly as the wind changes, I check their status page and they state

No Webpages
We are currently investigating a problem which may mean you are unable to view web pages. Please bear with us as we endeavour to resolve this problem as quickly as possible. Meanwhile we apologise for any inconvenience.

They also go on in my local area to say that there are problems connecting to the internet and it will be fixed in 2 hours. 2 hours came and went, and now 10 hours later still no news. So I do the thing that any sane person would do and call BT up (okay, where’s my hard hat?)

Within 4 mins my call gets answered by a heavy Indian speaking male that I’m having great difficulty in understanding. Yes, it’s that 4 second delay for your brain to work out what he’s saying. Please don’t take this as racism, I find it very difficult to understand people with thick heavy accents, like some people have problems understanding people with thick Gordie accents or Welsh accents.

Anyway…..the call starts off asking me what the problem is, I state what the website says and immediately the Indian call center guy says (whilst reading the status page) “yes, it will be fixed in two hours sir”, I reply, “that’s what you said at 10am!”, he says, “yes sir it will take 2 hours”, I reply “Let me guess, you’re in India?”, he replies, “Yes sir”, I reply, “Do you know what time it is in England?”, he says “10 o’clock”. I replied “No, it was 10 o’clock 10 hours ago, it’s now 8 o’clock (in the evening!)”.

Here’s where the conversation takes a turn…

The BT Indian call center guy then replies “It will take 24 hours”. I reply…”What? you said 2 hours, now you say 24 hours?”. He replies, “Yes sir”, I reply “so why 24 hours now?”, he replies “because that is the maximum amount of time it will take to fix a fault”.

Aha! We’re getting somewhere. So I then reply “so suddenly you jump from a 2 hour fix to a 24 hour fix time, and that’s a difference of 22 hours!”, he replies “yes sir, it will take 24 hours. If you would like a status update you can call back our automated status line” to which I reply “yes and that says 2 HOURS!”.

I then say “but this problem has been going on for two weeks, so you want me to wait another 24 hours in the hope that you can fix it in another 24 hours making it 360 hours to fix the problem as opposed to 336 hours?”, he replied “yes sir”. At that point I realised yet again I’m just wasting my breath and say “okay so I was going to upgrade to your faster package but now you’ve just angered me even more and I’m going to move to another internet service provider”, he replies “Dear Mr David” (oh and he doesn’t know what my surname is!!!”), “we would be sorry to lose you as a customer and appreciate your loyalty, goodbye sir” and hangs up the phone.

As you can see this ineptitude of the BT Call Center guy was getting no where fast, and that someone in India just really doesn’t care about the level of service they’re providing. Likewise BT also doesn’t seem to care that I’ve been a loyal customer for the last 12 years! So I’m going to be shortly changing to a new ISP and new phone company at this rate.

If anyone at BT reads this, you have my number and you can call me at anytime, but somehow I believe you won’t!

Running commentary on the entire problem is available here.