Email? What's that?
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I just signed up to online billing with BT. They immediately sent me a mail to thank me, and remind me of all the wonderful benefits to the environment from helping them reduce their paper usage. When I say a "mail", of course, I don't mean an email - they sent me a paper letter, in a paper envelope. Smooth.
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So now they have more paper available for printing spam! No wonder they are grateful.
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@ThePants999 said:
I just signed up to online billing with BT. They immediately sent me a mail to thank me, and remind me of all the wonderful benefits to the environment from helping them reduce their paper usage. When I say a "mail", of course, I don't mean an email - they sent me a paper letter, in a paper envelope. Smooth.
Of course, you'd be the last to complain if you were <hyper="bole">a 95 yr old</hyper> about to/in the middle of having your identity stolen to receive a paper notification that from then on you'd be receiving further communications by email.Then wonder why you're being cut off 6 months later due to non-payment of non-received bills.
I claim non-WTF on this. Unless they send you more crap through the snail-post of course..
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@PJH said:
@ThePants999 said:
I just signed up to online billing with BT. They immediately sent me a mail to thank me, and remind me of all the wonderful benefits to the environment from helping them reduce their paper usage. When I say a "mail", of course, I don't mean an email - they sent me a paper letter, in a paper envelope. Smooth.
Of course, you'd be the last to complain if you were <hyper="bole">a 95 yr old</hyper> about to/in the middle of having your identity stolen to receive a paper notification that from then on you'd be receiving further communications by email.Then wonder why you're being cut off 6 months later due to non-payment of non-received bills.
I claim non-WTF on this. Unless they send you more crap through the snail-post of course..This is BT that we're talking about. They don't need some fancy reason like "non-payment of non-received bills" to cut you off. They just keep a big database of service failures, and when the time since your last failure has grown too large, they send a man around to your house to cut your telephone line with a spade, and also any others that he sees on his way (just in case).
BT is possibly the only company that I have ever encountered who actively hates their customers. Even the great US telecom monopolies have only ever managed to get as far as complete apathy.
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Wachovia used to send me a letter each month asking me to login to my account and confirm my email address. It was always correct.
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@asuffield said:
They just keep a big database of service failures, and when the time since your last failure has grown too large, they send a man around to your house to cut your telephone line with a spade, and also any others that he sees on his way (just in case).
Had to stifle a laugh on that one. Mind catching a picture sometime?Even the great US telecom monopolies have only ever managed to get as far as complete apathy.
Agreed. The only problems I have are my DSL goes out when it thunders anywhere in a 5 mile radius, and they tend to just ignore phone calls and blame problems on user equipment.
I don't like it that AT&T bought BellSouth. Big Bell is congealing back into its former monopolistic glory.
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@AbbydonKrafts said:
Agreed. The only problems I have are my DSL goes out when it thunders anywhere in a 5 mile radius, and they tend to just ignore phone calls and blame problems on user equipment.
You have that problem too?
My roommate and I spent probably 40 hours on the phone with Verizon in the past month trying to convince them of this (they refused to even discuss the issue when the DSL was up -- i.e. any sunny day -- and required about 3 hours of testing to determine that there was noise on the line).
Once convinced, they agreed to send out a tech. My roommate waited all day for the tech and he never showed, so my roommate called support again. They said the ticket had been closed as "resolved" for no apparent reason.
The next time I called, we went through the whole rigamarole again to convince them that the DSL was down. They dropped my call in the middle and I had to call back and run through everything a third time. When they finally decided to send someone out, the rep on the phone called the central office.... and discovered why the last ticket had been closed.
The tech they'd sent the previous time had checked the external wiring and determined it was incapable of handling the connection speeds we were signed up for, so the ticket was marked "resolved" with a recommendation (that they had failed to pass on to us) that we downgrade our service.
We're switching to cable.
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@asuffield said:
This is BT that we're talking about. They don't need some fancy reason like "non-payment of non-received bills" to cut you off. They just keep a big database of service failures, and when the time since your last failure has grown too large, they send a man around to your house to cut your telephone line with a spade, and also any others that he sees on his way (just in case).
BT is possibly the only company that I have ever encountered who actively hates their customers. Even the great US telecom monopolies have only ever managed to get as far as complete apathy.
Ha ha, wait until you meet Telefonica - they service their customers literally on a shoestring budget:
To save money, the phone lines in my street used to be tied in some places on the power current posts to save money, until a subcontractor fearing to be fried sued them to fix it. They didn't bother to change the actual wires: they just brought in some old half-rotten wooden poles, put them in the ground at various angles except straight and rerouted the existing wires to them, leaving the wires hanging very low crossing the street.
Soon enough, a big truck passed and the wire snapped. It took them four days however to send somebody to fix it - leaving me and several neighbours without phone and DSL. This continued to happen about once a month. It's a residential area and that's about the rate that larger trucks pass by. In the end, we don't even bother calling them when the line snaps - we just tie it together ourselves. I could show you a snapshot were you can see the phone wire tied to a tilted post with a shoestring!
The RWTF is that by several measures Telefonica is the top 4 or 5 worldwide telco, buying up others across Europe and South America, so if you live there that's the future for you.
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@gotaq said:
@AbbydonKrafts said:
Agreed. The only problems I have are my DSL goes out when it thunders anywhere in a 5 mile radius, and they tend to just ignore phone calls and blame problems on user equipment.
You have that problem too?
My roommate and I spent probably 40 hours on the phone with Verizon in the past month trying to convince them of this (they refused to even discuss the issue when the DSL was up -- i.e. any sunny day -- and required about 3 hours of testing to determine that there was noise on the line).
snipped tale of woe getting Verizon to believeWe're switching to cable.
Amen, Brother! I used to live in Winchester, Massachusetts, USA. It took me 3 months to get DSL working. I ordered phone and DSL months before I moved in (from Christiansburg, Virginia, USA). I thought everything would be hunky dory. Not so. First off, they didn't know that because the condex we moved to had had full renovations, essentially a rebuild, there was no longer a phone cable from the street service to the residence. OK, order that, gotta wait a while to get it. Phone guy comes in, and there's a patch panel in the basement. He uses his special tool multiple times, but the wire keeps getting cut and doesn't want to work. He's an old pro, though, and uses a little snap connector that physically bridges the wires. I've got no complaints; he went above and beyond getting us a dial tone, making connections that he didn't have to.
OK, time for DSL, now that I have dial tone. I hook up my stuff, and the light on the receiver keeps blinking with the 'uhh, not working' signal. I call Verizon. To make this tale of woe shorter, I 'll give the highlights:
- I have to call Verizon DSL, the entity responsible for DSL, where they keep getting me to power cycle the receiver, to no avail
- I have to call Verizon the phone company, because Verizon DSL says it's not their problem
- I have to recall Verizon DSL, because Verizon the phone company say it's not their problem
- Verizon DSL and Verizon phone company keep ping ponging me record. Each time I call, I have to wait longer and longer as the phone rep page-downs through my previous calls
- I finally get the information that the circuit is bad at the central office. I ask, (naively, I know now), "Am I the only one on this CO?" "Oh no, we've got hundreds of customers with DSL at this CO" "And I'm the only one not working" "Yes"
- Mind you, I lived only a few hundred yards from the CO. I was sorely tempted to get a spool of wire, knock on the door, and say "Hook me up!"
Well, after the folks at the CO finally fixed whatever it was, service was good, it didn't go out during storms (prob. becuase I could spit to CO...), and was pretty fast.
Then I discovered cable after moving to TX. Count me as a convert!
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@JvdL said:
Soon enough, a big truck passed and the wire snapped. It took them four days however to send somebody to fix it - leaving me and several neighbours without phone and DSL. This continued to happen about once a month. It's a residential area and that's about the rate that larger trucks pass by. In the end, we don't even bother calling them when the line snaps - we just tie it together ourselves.
Oh man, that's awesome, in a sick way. You should put up one of those maximum height signs, to warn lorries, at each end of the road. Not that it would do any good, but people passing by could all go WTF at it (or whatever WTF translates to in Spanish ... "¿Que de fuquero?" or some such ... no hablo Español ;)
