almost witty

These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours…

• 09:37 Oh dear. I’m apparently as tall as Richard Hammond. #
• 11:12 My sister has accused me of being obsessed with my mobile phone and texting all the time. I wish! #
• 13:22 Just worked a 1970s Morecambe & Wise gag into a web headline. #
• 18:33 wondering who in west london fancies a pint in the summer sunshine #

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For the last 8 months or so, I was a customer with BT Broadband, and was very happy with their service and recommended it to other people, including my tenant in my London flat.

When it came for me to move back into my London flat, on 23 March, I told BT I was going to move into my London flat on 19 April.

Since then, BT seem totally unable to provide a service that was available to my tenant the day before I moved in. I have had three weeks of endless going back and forth between tech support staff who claim that everything on the exchange is fine, so it must be a local problem (although how they can tell that since they’re based in India, I don’t know!). There has been someone from customer service “following” my query, but that person seems utterly unable to do anything except make countless apologies.

On 2 May, I was promised that an engineer would come out to my flat and examine the set-up. I took the afternoon off to await the engineer - he NEVER arrived. I called the Faults service, only to be told that he was never meant to come to my flat, and was instead checking it out at the exchange. Where everything is, apparently, fine. So I called the “specialist” customer service manager who’s meant to be supervising my case - I was on hold for two hours before I gave up.

On 7 May, an engineer FINALLY came out to my place. Except he was a line faults engineer, not a broadband engineer. He couldn’t find a fault, so he called in his broadband engineer colleague. He made a few tests, muttered under his breath something about a code 716 again, and agreed that the fault was with the exchange. He promised that the fault would be rectified tonight. Needless to say, it hasn’t.

To add insult to injury, I have apparently been charged £39.51 for stopping my BT Broadband service before the minimum contract was up - when the only reason it was stopped was because I was moving, and was fully intending to use BT Broadband’s services in my new place.

So I wrote to various customer complaint areas within BT, including the email address for their CEO (allegedly- I very much doubt it is, but they do keep up the pretence to the point of having an auto-responder, and someone calling me back saying he was from the CEO’s office) and “high-level customer complaints“.

The next day, I was told by one of the customer complaints teams that the engineers had reported the fault was with my equipment - which was totally not what the engineers told me. Then they said that a “transaction engineer” was coming to the exchange, and it should all work tonight. Which, patently, it hasn’t.

Now BT are saying that the problem *must* be something to do with my home equipment, and want to send out another engineer. Despite the fact I’ve plugged in two seperate routers, and of course two engineers came out the day before to fix it. Plus, I’ve been charged £70.09 for a broadband service they still haven’t provided yet.

British Telecom must be the only company where you can have three people from an elevated customer services team “looking” over my problem, and still be unable to come up with any resolution!

By any stretch of the imagination, Stephen Fry is one of the very few people who totally understands and gets the digital revolution ™, and also has the eyes and ears of most of the population. More importantly, people like him and he is inherently likeable.

So it’s interesting that in a recent speech on the future of the BBC, he apparently declared that:
- the BBC should not be ghettoized
- he regularly breaks the digital lock on the BBC’s iPlayer
- the very existence of the iPlayer is making a lot of enemies for the BBC

It would be very interesting to find out whether he thinks the iPlayer lock should be beefed up (thus perpetuating the digital arms race), or whether he (as a rights provider of some considerable length) would be prepared to let his content loose online. Or whether it should be shut down entirely.

These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours…

• 17:31 Really hoping BT have fixed my broadband by the time I get home #
• 20:48 Fed up of BT’s broken promises and incompetence. #

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Pretty much on a whim, I thought I’d pop along to the practice session for a London softball team. After all, I played rounders when I was 11. How hard can it be?

So after finding the practice venue (on a gloriously sunny day in Hyde Park), I discovered that there were:

a. actually rules to softball
b. weird bits of technology and kit (eg the oversized glove)
c. requirements of being able to catch and throw a ball
d. I never got to bat. Once.

There were also quite a few Americans on the team. Which actually became an advantage when in the outfield, since their voices would carry far more than the equivalent British person.

Then it’s off to the pub afterwards, where it turns out that the team is sponsored by the Masons, but the team captain takes pains to reassure everyone that the Masons are mainly a charitable organisation who do lots of good work in the community. Oh, and despite the fact he sounds American, he’s actually an European man who went to an international finishing school in Switzerland, is dating an American woman, and is in fact a potential Conservative parliamentary candidate in a very Tory part of London. Other softball players hail from Los Angeles, Dublin and Scandinavia. I mean, really, just how much more international can you get?

Towards the end of the evening, I am reassured that I am utterly crap right now, but if I stick at it, I will improve to the point when I’m quite average within four to five games. For which, I have to pay a 30 quid subscription fee…