Ah, BT incompetence, how I've missed thee...

[denny]

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, 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.

Comments

[moosipher.livejournal.com]

Names , dates , times . Write the lot down - get a complaints address - post the lot . It's the only way to actually get anything done for sure . Well - that's the way it works at my place , anyway - and my understanding is that most call centres do operate along the same lines .

And Also - ARSE .

[deerfold.livejournal.com]

I don't know anyone who's ever asked for BT to do anything where the following procedure was not followed:

Contact BT
BT say "that'll be no problem" and pretend to make a note of what you've asked for.
Date of move/upgrade/change reached
Everything stops working.
Spend rest of life calling BT to sort it out.

My girlfriend (see userpic) refuses to have anything to do with them at all due to previous nightmares, so I'm forced to deal with them or we don't get shiny internet.

[kelemvor.livejournal.com]

I have the task of carving up the consolidated bills that BT send the business, and working out how much each site/business group owes Business Systems. I inherited a portfolio of problems, and have since been able to add my own to it.
If I ever go into business for myself, BT will not be invited to provide any form of communication service!

[faerie-in-boots.livejournal.com]

I think its internet/phone providers in general, I remember playing the same game with NTL not too long ago!

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

There is a number (17070, I think) which you can dial which does automated line testing.

Basically, BT's responsibility (in theory) ends at the inner socket of the master socket of the house, and they will charge you for callout if the fault is beyond that. Many people fuck up the wiring, and then complained when BT charged them, which is why they get you to do this.

The reason that there is an inner secret socket is that what BT provide to your house is a single-pair for the phone line. This pair is a multiplex of bell and voice, and a ground. The wiring that you use around the house (and that a phone will use) is 3 wire: bell, voice and ground. This splitting is done with, AIR, a very simple LC circuit, which is housed in the outer part of the master socket. The wiring around the house should come off this.

If they're generating a busy at the switch, that's either because the phone line is screwed up somewhere or because the wiring at your end looks like an off-hook phone. This is why they get you to unplug the inner bit of the master socket, so that they know that it really is their responsibility to diagnose the fault.

I do agree, however that they suck. When I was at the bunker, we didn't have our PRI (aka ISDN30) carrying our landlines for 4 days after we moved, and it was a comedy of errors getting it sorted. (the fibre wasn't lit because it was spliced into the wrong trays, and then the card wasn't configured properly and ....)

Once you've got the BT thing set up, 17070 will start off by telling you the number that you are dialling from, and can then do an automated line test, and I think an inbound call test. It's been a while since I tried it, though.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The engineer who turned up in the end was surprisingly competent - he turned up at the start of the timeslot, meaning I wasn't too late for work; he went to double-check the exchange after hearing about the ADSL order, because he thought it sounded as suspicious as I did; then he came back and ascertained the fault was actually a broken wire inside my wall (how did that happen overnight?) and changed the internal wiring to use a different pair to carry the signal. Oh, and he fitted a second master socket right where the wiring comes into the flat, so now I have a socket in the bedroom as well as the living room, which is handy :)

I sometimes wonder if BT would be okay if you could just deal with the people who actually DO stuff, rather than having to deal with the mass of incompetents who act as their customer 'service' contacts.