It’s been over four months since we moved into our new apartment and we still don’t have our own internet connection.
Having originally placed our order with o2, they failed to turn up to install the phone line and then insisted that they had turned up, even though Norm was there, with his phone turned up and got neither a knock on the door nor a phone call, we cancelled with them and re-ordered with BT.
This meant waiting another four weeks for an appointment, but when the time came George managed to book a day of work to sort everything out. But BT never turned up.
I phoned them to ask what was happening. They said they would go away and investigate and phone me back. Five minutes later they did. They said that they didn’t have our address in their engineer’s database, so couldn’t turn up and had to wait 24 hours for the database to update before they could say when they could come.
That is one of the craziest things I have ever heard. But even if you find that credible, I then enquired why they hadn’t even notified us when they realised they couldn’t turn up. They said they had my number down incorrectly – this would be slightly more believable if it wasn’t for the case that they were telling me this after phoning me back! How exactly did they have my number down incorrectly if they’ve just called me on it?
They promised they would phone me back after 3pm the next day to arrange a new appointment.
At 2pm the next day, I got an email from our landlady asking if one of us could call her ASAP. I did, and she said a BT engineer was trying to get into our apartment. Obviously, having not been told he was coming, we weren’t home. I said it was OK to let him in, but by the time I had done that, he had already left.
I phoned BT to see what was going on, but having left me on hold for a few minutes to investigate they told me that the engineers’ reports don’t come in until 6pm so they didn’t know what was happening and promised they would ring me back the next day.
They didn’t phone me, so that afternoon I phoned them and had a long conversation about what was going on. By this point the issue was deemed so serious that I was transfered to someone based in the UK, who actually spoke fluent English.
He said that they simply couldn’t install a line if our address wasn’t in the Royal Mail database. So even though they had been to our property the day before to install the line, they couldn’t install the line because they didn’t believe that our property existed.
At this point, I decided on a new strategy. I told them that they had our address wrong. We actually lived in apartment 14 (actually, I tried 13 first but because of superstitious nonsense, there is no apartment 13), so they should install it to that property. I also explained that for unknown reasons apartment 14 would be labelled “303” on the door, even though it definitely was apartment 14. They updated their records and scheduled a new appointment in two weeks time.
The appointment arrived and the engineer turned up to install our line. After a frantic twenty minutes trying to find the housekeeper to let us into the comms room (we don’t have any contact details for her, so we have to phone the landlady, who phones the housekeeper), the engineer finally got access and began surveying the situation. It turned out the only way we could get it working was to use the existing network because the building had never given any consideration to people actually wanting a phone line (the alternative was to run a new line in, up the side of the building – that was my preference to avoid all this nonsense but it would inevitably incur other nonsense instead).
Ok, so we just need to work out how we’re plugged in at the moment. Easy enough? Not quite. The comms room has a series of 10 48-port switches, none of which had any labelling on. I’m sure you can do the maths but to be clear, that makes 480 ports, one of which was our apartment – but we had no idea which.
The engineer began investigating. With some further surprise restrictions now being enforced by the building management, we were now running into an extended appointment which the engineer said it would have to bill us extra for. We told him that if such a bill would be under £100 then we would pay it, otherwise he could get on his bike.
Luckily, the bill suddenly did come in at “under £100”, so by lunch time we had a phone line we were assured would soon be working. We had no phone to plug into it, so no way to verify said claim, but I’m sure BT wouldn’t let us down. Now just to order the actual internet…
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Tags: basic human rights, bt, internet, phone line, stress
This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2012 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.