It is 20.56 Sunday evening in the Jones household.
And we are in bed.
I am pitter-pattering on the laptop keys and Soph is reading one of the many academic journals to which she subscribes.
The move is done, in fact both moves are done. We are in our new home and Vin is in his new home. Rural Oxfordshire has three new residents.
We’ve been out this evening and reconnoitred the first method of commuting in to London I’m going to try. And on the way back we found a nice-looking pub where lovely food was served. Now we have tummies just a little rounder than they were a couple of hours ago.
In the house, we’ve found the boiler-operating instructions and now have acres of hot water (or whatever hot water is measured in – we have it!), and we are both squeaky clean and freshly showered and – as mentioned before – in bed.
And we have a telephone line. Yay!
But owing to various people at BT being complete and utter total cunting fucktards we don’t have broadband. Boo!
I’m not altogether sure why BT have chosen not to deliver the broadband we ordered weeks ago.
Last Thursday the BT engineer came to connect the house up – which gave us the line and a number. The order I placed was for BT to switch the broadband on the following day (Friday)
Except I tested the line for broadband on Saturday and guess what?
No broadband.
Soph, bless, rang BT while I stood in the corner and fumed like a super-villain who’d just been told that Batman (or whoever) hadn’t been killed after all and was even now on his way to my secret hideaway in the Batmobile (or whatever).
Yes, I stood there cursing that my meticulously planned plan had inexplicably not happened.
Soph spent about 20 minutes on the phone to various people in call centres on a number of different continents.
I sweetly took over.
It transpires that even though I placed the order weeeeeeks ago, BT hadn’t actually done all that they needed to do to enable broadband on the line. Well when I say ‘BT hadn’t actually done all that they needed to do to enable broadband…’ I really mean ‘BT hadn’t actually done anything that they needed to do to enable broadband…’
And as a result we aren’t going to get broadband for over a week more.
Which, as you can imagine, is really not good. And also not acceptable.
Unfortunately as well as making this switch in the Master Plan, dear old BT forgot to tell someone about this inexplicable slippage.
Can you tell who it is yet?
Yep, they forgot to tell us.
Which is absolutely fucking wonderful.
I’m actually wondering if we can tell BT to go and stick their head up a dead bear’s bum, cancel the broadband contract with them – as they clearly don’t want our business – and see if Virgin (or some other ISP) is interested.
I wouldn’t go with Tiscali because they’re really shit, but there are others. Which now has me wondering why on earth I went with BT in the first place.
Why didn’t I cast around the marketplace to see who else was available, instead of just jumping in to bed with the first ISP who came to mind?
It’s just ‘because’, isn’t it?
It’s because they are British Telecom and they’ve been around for so long and they’re at the forefront of the consumer’s psyche (well, this consumer anyway).
But perhaps it really is time to break away from that mindset.
Perhaps I need to start thinking outside the box.
And perhaps I need to tell BT where to get off?
B.
Come on, my dear. They made a mistake. I doubt you’d get much better service from any of the other providers out there. There are always going to be mistakes like this – it’s just a case of whether or not they happen to you.
I’m very happy that you and your lovely Soph are all happy and settled and snuggled 🙂 Love you both, missed you whilst I was away.
Amy, we both missed you too. You’ll have to come down, the town’s cute! Not as cute as you, obv.
Anyway, glad you had a nice break. It sounds as though you had a relaxing time. 🙂
Yeah, you’re right about BT making a mistake. The thing is, the amount of money I pay them, I’d actually expect them to have sufficiently good business processes in place to mitigate against mistakes.
Maybe I will. As long as you both promise not to be serial psycho killers, praying on teenage girls who write self absorbed rambly Blogs 😛
We’ve had BT cock up for us in the past, but they’ve always solved the problem fairly quickly. Maybe that’s what the extra is? And hopefully they’ll come through for you faster too.
I’m with Virgin and really cannot fault their broadband service – fast (20MB) and reliable.
The man in Carphone Warehouse last week told me that they recommend Virgin wherever possible.
If you live in ‘rural’ Oxfordshire though, I’d be surprised if your area was cabled up.
Amy – it’s ok, we don’t pray on teenage girls who write self absorbed rambly Blogs…I decline to comment upon the psycho serial killers part, however.
Come visit!:)
And BT seem to have corrected the lack of Broadband…again, without telling us, but hey, it seems to be working!
xxx