Metamorphosis
I hate bureaucracy. I hate its glacial slowness. I hate its unbending certainty. I hate its crushing ineptitude and I hate its ability to suck the joy and merriment out of your life.
After moving into Schossadlerflug we've been wanting to get a phone line installed mostly so it can have broadband and we can play on the interwebs. Wondering why posting has been so light? Now you have your answer. I'm writing this at the studio between renders on the three projects I seem to be working concurrently on.
Ten days ago I used the surprisingly efficient online ordering system at www.bt.com to order a new line to be put into the flat. Let's not forget, that isn't the internet, this is just a phone line so we can then order the internet. For eight days I hear nothing, though they do seem to have gratefully accepted a hundred and twenty quid of my money for this inactivity. On Tuesday I returned from a meeting to discover an answerphone message on my mobile from someone at BT to inform me that they were trying to contact me to discuss my order. They didn't allude what they wished to talk about but they did give me a number to call. So call it I did. I waited for twenty minutes until the call was answered. It then took another half hour for the friendly but clueless operator to work out that he couldn't help me and I was given another number which, I was assured, had someone on the other end who would be able to tell me what was going on.
Undaunted by my hour long phone-call with nothing to show I dialled again. And I waited and then waited some more. I waited for forty minutes as the dialling tone was periodically interrupted by a robot to tell me that their lines were very busy at the moment, for which the soulless machine was very sorry, and that my call would be answered as soon as possible. I gave up and decided to call later. I phoned again at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and again my call went unanswered for forty minutes each time. My mood darkened and yet I would not give up just yet. So this morning I got into work at 8 a.m. sharp and dialled one more time. I waited for an hour and yet there was still no response other than the robot telling me how busy they still were so I screamed at the injustice of the world and gave up. Though I've ordered my line online, I can't check its progress online as BT's order-tracking works by you telling it the phone number of the line you wish to query - which I don't have yet. And I can't telephone the telephone company to either check on progress or cancel my damn order because they refuse to answer the bloody thing.
I might not expect BT to be terribly good at paper-work or to have a sparkling online presence but I do expect the premier telephone company to be able to run a call centre and answer the damn device they seem determined not to supply me with. This whole affair is taking on Kafka-ian proportions now, "One morning Gregor Atrocity awoke to discover he'd been turned into a gigantic BT sales agent." One might imagine that if customers of a major telecommunications provider have to wait for longer than an hour to get any service, for which they have paid, the company would hire more people for their call centre. Sadly BT only made £6 billion in profits last year so a few more telephone operators would probably put too much of a strain on resources.
After moving into Schossadlerflug we've been wanting to get a phone line installed mostly so it can have broadband and we can play on the interwebs. Wondering why posting has been so light? Now you have your answer. I'm writing this at the studio between renders on the three projects I seem to be working concurrently on.
Ten days ago I used the surprisingly efficient online ordering system at www.bt.com to order a new line to be put into the flat. Let's not forget, that isn't the internet, this is just a phone line so we can then order the internet. For eight days I hear nothing, though they do seem to have gratefully accepted a hundred and twenty quid of my money for this inactivity. On Tuesday I returned from a meeting to discover an answerphone message on my mobile from someone at BT to inform me that they were trying to contact me to discuss my order. They didn't allude what they wished to talk about but they did give me a number to call. So call it I did. I waited for twenty minutes until the call was answered. It then took another half hour for the friendly but clueless operator to work out that he couldn't help me and I was given another number which, I was assured, had someone on the other end who would be able to tell me what was going on.
Undaunted by my hour long phone-call with nothing to show I dialled again. And I waited and then waited some more. I waited for forty minutes as the dialling tone was periodically interrupted by a robot to tell me that their lines were very busy at the moment, for which the soulless machine was very sorry, and that my call would be answered as soon as possible. I gave up and decided to call later. I phoned again at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and again my call went unanswered for forty minutes each time. My mood darkened and yet I would not give up just yet. So this morning I got into work at 8 a.m. sharp and dialled one more time. I waited for an hour and yet there was still no response other than the robot telling me how busy they still were so I screamed at the injustice of the world and gave up. Though I've ordered my line online, I can't check its progress online as BT's order-tracking works by you telling it the phone number of the line you wish to query - which I don't have yet. And I can't telephone the telephone company to either check on progress or cancel my damn order because they refuse to answer the bloody thing.
I might not expect BT to be terribly good at paper-work or to have a sparkling online presence but I do expect the premier telephone company to be able to run a call centre and answer the damn device they seem determined not to supply me with. This whole affair is taking on Kafka-ian proportions now, "One morning Gregor Atrocity awoke to discover he'd been turned into a gigantic BT sales agent." One might imagine that if customers of a major telecommunications provider have to wait for longer than an hour to get any service, for which they have paid, the company would hire more people for their call centre. Sadly BT only made £6 billion in profits last year so a few more telephone operators would probably put too much of a strain on resources.
Labels: complaints dept, customer care, fear and loathing
scribbled hastily by Mr Atrocity at 12:21 pm
1 Comments:
Oh my Gawd, but that's got to be frustrating.
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