Posts Tagged ‘stress’

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…

We got in this morning to find that one of the server’s external connections was down. Upon further investigation I found that the internet was in fact working fine, we just had a different IP address which is why the network monitoring was reporting that the server wasn’t responding.

I phoned up Opal, a part of TalkTalk, who have apparently taken over from Pipex – they didn’t tell us or anything, I just headed over to the Pipex Business website and found it was now an Opal website. I tried logging in to see our customer details but it didn’t accept my username or password and I couldn’t reset my password because I didn’t have an Opal customer number.

I phoned them up and sat in a queue for 10 minutes before getting through to someone who told me I was through to the wrong department. She informed me our line had a block on it and then put me through to the “other” technical department at which point I sat in another phone queue for 10 minutes before finally getting through to the right person.

I asked about the block and he informed me that they had cut us off because we hadn’t paid. This is because none of the credit or debit card payments transferred over when Pipex customers were moved over to Opal – only direct debit customers were safe and we’re not a direct debit customer because they messed that up recently and so we had to pay via credit card instead.

As a result they had cut our internet off – except in a moment of sheer incompetence they haven’t actually cut us off, they just think they have – I can actually access the internet fine. If it wasn’t for the fact that I needed our IP address back I would have just ignored them as the fools they are.

He informed me that if I made a payment they could re-activate my account. But he couldn’t take that payment or put me through – I had to phone back on a different number. I then asked about the fact I couldn’t log in and he said I would need to speak to Pipex, providing a third separate number I would need to phone to get that sorted out.

Fun times.

I’m really feeling the stress and strain at the moment so I’m trying to take it a bit easier. Hence it’s only 11:15 and I’m in bed already. With I hope only about 30 minutes of work to finish off before I can go to sleep I am hoping to be out by around midnight and almost get my full 8 hours in!

I feel this is somehow giving in though, normally I would have just had some red bull and kept going for a while longer, while I could do given my detox doesn’t start until Sunday (and to be honest it will probably be fairly flexible). I feel it might do me some good almost getting the required amount of sleep in for one night though so I’m going to give it the old college try.

It is a strange time of year. Often the large amount of procrastination that occur at such periods as this sends people towards the blogs encouraging a flurry of posts. But things are for the most part silent at the moment. Hell, even my blog has been fairly infrequent recently. We’re talking days between posts. Days!

People on the whole have been fairly quiet. It’s a mix of people not being here and people generally being dispontent. The usual suspects can be found in DEC-10 every day – myself, Si, Dan, Jezz, Chris S and crazy Spanish guy.

Stress levels seem to be flucuating quite a lot at the moment. I felt fairly good about Rationalist Week this morning, I had found us some places that would rent us a van and things were falling into place. But it occured to me this evening that if we don’t get our funding sorted by the end of the week – we are going to have to cancel Rationalist Week.

Yeah.

Then there is FYP.

Yeah.

Then there is post graduation plans.

Yeah.

The moral of the story is, you all need to blog more. So the rest of us have something to read when we’re supposed to be doing things that will affect the rest of our entire lives.

Stress levels are rising. Ignoring the fact that I have like a week left to finish the first entire draft of my FYP write-up, the fact I have 10 hour shifts at work today and tomorrow, the fact I need to fight Vodaphone over bricking my phone, the fact I need to have a bitch at o2 because my new SIM won’t work, the fact I need to speak to careers, the fact I need to find a job, the fact I still need to catch up on a load of work for my business and the fact I need to sort my financial situation out, Rationalist Week is like 2 weeks away.

So, does anyone else fancy spending every night for the next two weeks in The Terrace shooting pool and getting really drunk until we can’t remember our troubles? ;).