Monday evening last week I took over the phone line at my flat. Tuesday morning I placed an ADSL order with
Andrews & Arnold. Tuesday night,
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libellum rang my mobile to tell me that she'd been trying to call my landline for a couple of hours but it was permanently engaged. I went and picked up the landline phone and the line was dead.
"Ah," I thought "I'd completely forgotten the astounding levels of incompetence that BT regularly achieve."
I ignored it for a bit, to see if it started working again on its own, but by Friday morning it was still dead, so I rang BT from my mobile on the way to work. BT's response to my phone being faulty was to require me to dismantle the master socket housing and plug a "known working telephone" into a hidden socket that can be found inside it. This is to stop them being called out by people whose fault lies with the phone (or whatever) rather than the line (and who therefore get charged callout fees by BT), so I suppose it's not entirely unreasonable... but it still grates to be told that you have to do your own initial fault diagnosis when their equipment fucks up.
Anyway, I pointed out that this procedure would be a bit tricky to do from my current location in the street, also from my office, and the lady staffing the fault line offered me a choice of times for them to call back and find out how my initial fault testing had gone. I chose between 8pm and 10pm that evening.
Of course, they didn't call back. But I hadn't got around to doing the test anyway, so I wasn't too bothered, and I didn't bother chasing it.
Saturday, while I was at the theatre (fortunately with my mobile turned off), they rang back. The guy left a barely comprehensible message on my voicemail claiming that I'd booked a callback for Saturday, and inviting me to phone them back if I'd completed the test they'd required.
Sunday I took my phone to a neighbour's flat, where it worked, then took my master socket apart, found the Top Sekrit hidden socket, and used it. Still no dialtone.
Today I rang BT from work to chase the situation up. While I was on hold, I found that they have a fault tracking area on their website, so I plugged my number into it to see what it said. You can imagine my delight to find that the agent who spoke to my voicemail on Saturday apparently considered leaving a message in broken English to have entirely resolved my problem, as he had closed the bloody fault report.
The guy who eventually answered the phone didn't apologise for this (of course), but did condescend (after I'd described to him in detail the exact process I'd followed to test the line, twice) to book an engineer to come and look at my line. Tomorrow morning, any time between 8am and 1pm. Because they wouldn't want it to be convenient or anything.
I think I may have just been given the necessary incentive to get
BT Suck back into action.
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