Telco Hell

Heaven help where this great land of ours is heading, where we can't even keep any of our service centres in our own country these days.

Calling a telco is a total nightmare, and I mean ANY telco!  Over the years, I've butted heads with Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Three.  Hmm, is that enough?

Vodafone wins hands down when it comes to BS.  I tried them twice, but can't imagine why.  The first time, I had  a mobile phone that used to drop its calls out around the western suburbs of Melbourne, such as Sunshine, which happens to be only about 10km for the CBD.  When I rang Vodafone to complain about it, their answer was, "Well, when you signed up, did you say you wanted to use it in Sunshine?"

Of course, I didn't think of that.

The second time was a couple of years ago, having a Vodafone internet experience this time with one of their USB stick internet things, which used to drop out every ten minutes or so.  They suggested I move my desk near the window.  And open the window.  And try and dangle the dongle out the window.  Being in the depths of a Melbourne winter, the strategy just held no appeal, so I sacked them.  Again.

I had a mobile service with Optus, but I had to stand on my back deck to get any service as there was none to be had inside the house.  Again, not a problem if you live somewhere warm.  I didn't.  But I persevered with them for the two years of the contract as they didn't think I had enough reason to "opt" out of it.  So I spent many chilly nights on the deck, until I decided it was easier and more comfortable just not to answer the phone anymore when the weather went bad.

You probably think by now I was living in the sticks somewhere, but actually I lived in a heavily populated suburb of Melbourne.

I also didn't get a broadband service until about five years after everyone else, because I apparently lived too far from the exchange.  So I was still on dial-up when everyone else was zooming on the 'band.

And then there was Telstra....

I think one of their best efforts was the "high speed cable broadband" which they sold to me as if it was the second coming.  Well, I thought so too, until it would drop out everytime it rained.  Apparently the pits used to fill up with water, so on rainy days there would always be dropouts, and sometimes outages that went on for days.  The salesman had helpfully omitted this minor detail when selling me the package, and even more helpfully, had departed his job at the local Telstra shop in Parkmore when I went over there to hang him out to dry.  He had probably taken a job in a call centre and relocated to Mumbai.

More recently, upon moving to Qld, I ordered an ADSL service, which took roughly a month to transfer across when I moved house again.  Given that I moved all of a kilometre, I couldn't understand the difficulty but apparently these things take time.  It's not just flicking a switch, and even when your new phone line gets connected, it takes at least four days for your internet to come on.  You also can't run them concurrently at your old house and your new house to alleviate the gap; they expect to turn off your old service, wait a minimum of four business days, and then hopefully be able to activate your new one.  I say hopefully, but mine took a month.  And I know others who have had a similar experience.  As my job depends on a stable internet service, this is extremely frustrating to say the least.  So they sold me a stick internet to use in the interim, which drops out roughly every ten minutes or so, costs a lung and a kidney in data, and often informs me that my computer is too old when I try to get it going.  Otherwise OK.

I had yet another outage last week, which occurred during the busiest part of my work day.  After dangling on the phone for two phone calls, each of around 40 minutes duration, the bright spark who was managing my second call decided to do a line check.  Voila!  I had an outage apparently, myself and ten other unfortunates in the area, and it would be reinstated in about five days time.  Well, THANK YOU for letting me know that one was coming, and great to spend 90 minutes on the phone to find that little gem out.

So when the internet finally deigned to return to me, which was over the weekend, I found my laptop could no longer wirelessly connect.  There followed a flurry of phone calls on the Saturday, roughly three hours in total, being put through to areas that were closed, which would then necessitate my having to ring back and start the whole process all over again.  I didn't know whether to scream, cry or drink.  The wireless thing is a big thing, simply because there is only a phone point in the kitchen (where everybody would be having their office, of course, not)  and therefore it would mean that to connect via cable, I'd either have to move my computer into the kitchen, or run about a 20 metre cord to the bedroom where I work. 

Anyway after spending all those hours on the phone talking to a succession of Indians who were increasingly hard to understand because I think my ears were just shutting out those accents in sheer protest in the end, of the fact that we can't have a person who speaks our language to help us anymore, the end result was pretty much as it was always going to be.  It was all my fault, my computer's fault for not recognising the modem wirelessly anymore, even though it was working fine when Telstra pulled the pin on me all those days ago, and I had three choices apparently: either get my computer fixed, buy a newer computer, or use a line extension so I could cable across to the modem.

I chose the third option in the end, $14.95 from Hardly Normal.  And I now have a squiggly phone cord that runs all the way from my kitchen bench, through my lounge, and into my bedroom.  It has been there since this morning, and I have tripped over it roughly 15 times today.  But at least I can work.

Too bad there was no work today, as it turned out.

I need a drink...