Telstra: The Vortex of Incompetence
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auto-incorrected the address
What, you mean companies don't have every possible address inconceivable on their system?Actually, it almost sounds like you were talking to consumer sales/support. Why else would they assume a business customer doesn't want to manage their business account at a business address?
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@jas88 said:
auto-incorrected the address
What, you mean companies don't have every possible address inconceivable on their system?Actually, it almost sounds like you were talking to consumer sales/support. Why else would they assume a business customer doesn't want to manage their business account at a business address?
No, they had the right address initially, then later changed it to a near match for another address in their database thinking it was "better". (It's a short street with five office buildings on, normally referred to by name, but they decided to use numbers; the number defaulted to 1, which was the wrong building.)
Who said anything about any non-business address? The billing address was the office address, but BT "validated" it into a wrong address which happened to belong to another company in another building. The WTF was assuming there had to be a number, then assuming that it was OK to set that number to 1, then assuming that we must therefore be the company at number 1.
They were actually addressing our bills to: "Correct Company Ltd, Wrong Company Ltd, 1 Business Park St, City" - the "Wrong Company Ltd" being the company next door's name, and the "1" being BT's own invention. Since we knew that company - both spinouts from the same university, with one director in common, in fact - they were happy to drop our mail in next door, but getting our phoneline installed in their building was a step too far.
(In fact, the mail service in the UK does (try to) maintain a database of every deliverable address, and sells that to large companies like BT for exactly this purpose - but updates aren't instant and there are occasional gaps and errors, which is how BT ended up picking the nearest match address they knew of and using that instead of the one supplied by the customer.)
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Who said anything about any non-business address?
I certainly didn't...?
Correct Company Ltd, Wrong Company Ltd, 1 Business Park St, City
I think it's just the sales team finally succeeding in partial brainwash, as they keep telling me about such a higher level of support if I happen to be a "business class" customer.I have to ask myself, "Hmm, where is this located? Microsoft, Apple, Nerdfock, 0 NW Redmound Way? Must be some weird merge thing they're doing over there, yeah. Looks good to me, tag it and bag it!"
Filed under: Not paid to think.
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I was puzzled by your "Why else would they assume a business customer doesn't want to manage their business account at a business address?"
Amusingly, with a fault on my home broadband service (which, after six engineer visits, was finally tracked to a core router 50 miles away run by another division) one of the engineers tried telling me I'd be better off on a "business service" - of course, the (wholesale) division he works for doesn't even have business or residential services: the produce he was investigating a fault on is "80/20 GEA FTTC", a point to point Ethernet over VDSL link. I asked him why he thought it wasn't "business class", so he pointed to the cheap plastic router being used for the testing; I pointed to the hefty chunk of Cisco metal beside it which normally did that job, and he changed his tune.
Of course, this was the same service one of his colleagues turned up to install two years earlier, to find they had the wrong paperwork: the wrong box was checked for something. There wasn't any extra charge for the correct version, it didn't require extra equipment or anything - but they phoned the boss, who said not to install the service, just give up and go home without doing the job. The second attempt, they gave me a timeslot - but forgot to assign an engineer to do it, so nobody showed up. Third time, a veteran local guy turned up, did the job and went away, shaking his head in despair at the rest...
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shaking his head in despair at the rest...
If prem techs don't do that, I know they're not too experienced in the field.
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a fault on my home broadband service (which, after six engineer visits, was finally tracked to a core router 50 miles away run by another division)
We had an issue about a year and a half ago with our old phone lines at one of our offices kept going down. Finally, it stayed down long enough for a tech to trace it back - about 10 miles up the road to a junction box, where a family of mice had taken up residence. After eliminating the mice, nest, etc. and repairing the wires, he closed up the box and filled it with gravel to prevent a repeat. No issues since (though we converted to a VoIP system a few months ago and decommissioned that system.)
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Some years ago, I wanted to switch my office line (one line, PSTN + ADSL: about as simple as it gets while still having broadband) to a new tariff.
A new... tariff?
Are you exporting vegetables with it or...?
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A definition of tariff which you are apparently unfamiliar with:
@www.oxforddictionaries.com said:
1.2 chiefly British A list of the fixed charges made by a business, especially for use of gas, electricity, or a mobile phone.
While that definition says "chiefly British", I see it all the time in the moving industry here in the US. Things like contracted tariffs and "Which tariff is this shipment under?".
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Tariff: the phone world word for "price we can charge you, as per all the various governmental regulations, fee schedules, and bureaucratic rubber stamps that dictate what any given provider can charge any given customer".
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Yeah I don't have a crazy moon-person dictionary.
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Google can hook you up!
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While that definition says "chiefly British", I see it all the time in the moving industry here in the US. Things like contracted tariffs and "Which tariff is this shipment under?".
It's also the term Verizon use, even right there in the URL itself: http://www.verizon.com/tariffs/ - as well as AT&T, except the link's broken right now: http://www.att.com/tariffs - and up in the frozen North, too: http://www.bce.ca/aboutbce/regulatory/tariffs/bellcanada
It seems Telstra don't use the term down in Australia, though; for most of the English-speaking telco world it seems to be the standard term. Which would make sense, since that's where I always used it (US/UK regulatory and interconnect stuff).
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a short street with five office buildings on, normally referred to by name
TRWTF is the seeming lack of a standardised house/building numbering scheme in the UK. Some streets I’ve seen were numbered consecutively up one side, then continued back down the other side; others had even numbers on one side and odd on the other; and there are probably other systems in use as well. Apparently, a name is also considered a decent substitute for a number.
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TRWTF is the seeming lack of a standardised house/building numbering scheme in the UK.
It usually depends on the developer of the site. Older properties may well predate numbering schemes, and in some parts the numbering is based on something that either you have no access to (e.g., a private square) or that no longer exists…
As long as it is unique enough for the postman, it's not a big deal.
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A few days later, the broadband bit went dead too. Then we received hundreds of pounds of bills for early termination fees. Then they sent an engineer to the building next door to install the "new" line, since they'd auto-incorrected the address to be the wrong building. (They inserted a 1 in the street, spotted that there was a company at that address and inserted that company name too, rendering it totally wrong.)
No, they didn't render it completely wrong. Let me give you an example of rendering it completely wrong (although even my example gave an address in the same country).It's 2001 or so, and Mr Cynic orders $item from jungle.com. Coincidentally, they are within hours of launching a major IT upgrade. Mr Cynic's delivery address is transformed by this upgrade from:
123 A Street SmallVillage Oxfordshire <<<=== Importantto:
123 A Street Berkshire <<<=== Notice this, and the fact that there's no town/village specified.The latter of these has basically no chance in hell of being delivered.
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Wow - that's an impressive shipment of fail - although at least in that case, they did have the right street, but in the wrong county, so things might eventually reach you with diligent investigation.
I used to live near a small village called Moscow. Their mail had been known to turn up weeks late with Cyrillic postal stamps on, having been sent to the better-known Moscow by mistake...
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TRWTF is the seeming lack of a standardised house/building numbering scheme in the UK. Some streets I’ve seen were numbered consecutively up one side, then continued back down the other side; others had even numbers on one side and odd on the other; and there are probably other systems in use as well. Apparently, a name is also considered a decent substitute for a number.
They do vary - I live in number 20 on this street, which is in between 19 and 21, but a friend nearby lives in number 29 which is next to number 27.
Names work perfectly well in small groups, though: my grandfather's home is one of a group of half a dozen in the countryside, so why would they need numbers? It just has a name, and mail works perfectly well with that.
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BT still manages to dig themselves a deeper hole than this.
For BT this is quite an achivement.
We recently had BT install an additional ADSL line at our site. The line was in place they just needed to dig down to look at it for $reasons and then turn it on. The day came for the big dig, BT turned up and dug a trech 2 feet deep along the road. And then went home. We dutifully called and enquired after our errant excavators, only to be informed that our cable was buried > 2 feet in depth, and the team that turned up weren't qualified to dig that deep. A team had been allocated to us who could dig deeper than 2' and they'd be along in 1-2 weeks.
It's good to know the public sector spirit is still alive and well so many years after privatisation.
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Obligatory mention of my town having a street where #1 is half a kilometer away from #2
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the team that turned up weren't qualified to dig that deep
Below a certain depth, they need to put in shoring on the sides of the hole to stop it collapsing on top of the guy down it.
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Yes, the people digging the hole not only didn't have any, but weren't trained to use it.
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Wow - that's an impressive shipment of fail - although at least in that case, they did have the right street, but in the wrong county, so things might eventually reach you with diligent investigation.
Sadly it was the sort of street name that is reasonably common in contemporary British towns, and courier services are known for not doing that sort of investigation.
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Obligatory mention of my town having a street where #1 is half a kilometer away from #2
Or the street I lived on just outside Endicott, NY which had maybe twenty houses on it, all of them numbered in the upper 800s or lower 900s.
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Yes, the people digging the hole not only didn't have any, but weren't trained to use it.
It was awful nice of them to leave the hole unfilled so the next team wouldn't have to redig. And to presumably not put up any kind of barriers to keep people or cars from falling in, so the next team wouldn't have to move said barriers.
Wait, I said "awful nice" but I just meant "awful".
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There is a used-to-be-small village (hamlet?) nearby that started out as a single farm, so no street names, just "Village".
Then they started building more and more houses. Still no street names, the farm became "Village 1" and the first house added became "Village 2" and so on.
Right now there are 50+ houses on ten or so little streets, still no street names and numbered in the order they were built. The last time I checked GPS maps know only "Village", no numbers at all. Good luck finding a specific house without driving through every single little street and trying to spot the numbers.
People resorted to adding hints like "the big green house on the left" to their delivery addresses.
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They do vary - I live in number 20 on this street, which is in between 19 and 21, but a friend nearby lives in number 29 which is next to number 27.
All streets in this country are numbered odd on one side, even on the other, and the lowest number on each side is (supposed to be) the one closest to the village or town centre. This causes some minor problems in streets with few buildings, or with a lot more buildings on one side than the other, since No. 2 may not be approximately opposite No. 1 but could be at the other end of the street. Also, fun is to be had on streets that are partly in one municipality and partly in another but keep the same name, since it may have a number 1 at each end and have a very odd jump in numbering somewhere halfway along (one that I use frequently jumps from 15, 17, 19 to — off the top of my head — 121, 119, 117 in that order).Names work perfectly well in small groups, though: my grandfather's home is one of a group of half a dozen in the countryside, so why would they need numbers?
That could also be reversed: why would they need names when numbers will work perfectly well? :)There is a used-to-be-small village (hamlet?) nearby that started out as a single farm, so no street names, just "Village".
Not that far from where I live is pretty much the opposite: a hamlet called [url=https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3818891,3.595318,276m/data=!3m1!1e3]Nummer Eén[/url] — that literally translates as Number One. This is also the name of every street there, even though if you look at a map it gives the appearance of having several.
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Obligatory mention of my town having a street where #1 is half a kilometer away from #2
Oooh, oooh, can I one-up you?
Laurel St. is a somewhat wide street in $CITY leading to $TOWN. Hardy St. is a kilometers-long major artery of $TOWN next to the city, and effectively a ring road for $CITY - most of the 18-wheel transport goes through there.
My neighbourhood is A, B and C - a group of three houses somewhat near each other, led to by a common road. And when I say "road", I'm overestimating it more than Google - in reality, it looks like this:
Now, under what address do people at A, B, and C live?
If you guessed "Laurel St.", you're wrong. If you guessed "Hardy St.", you're also wrong. Because that small blue line going accross the road? In addition to being a now-defunct six-inch-deep creek, it's also the official border between $CITY and $TOWN, so C ended up with a Laurel St. address, and A and B live at Hardy St., despite there being no way to get to them from that side, because there's a fucking forest in the way.
"Oh, but at least the numeration is consistent, right?" Well, no. It sort of used to be - A was Hardy St. 1 and B was Hardy St. 3, which still makes no sense given that they're nowhere near Hardy St., but at least two houses next to each other had numbers that said so, since Poland has an even-odd house numbering system for the most part. Then like 10 years ago they changed it so that A is still Hardy St. 1, but B is now Hardy St. 14. Where are 2-13? Fuck if I know either.
Oh, and to add to the confusion, $CITY also has a Hardy St., but it's in a totally different district altogether. So if you tell the pizza driver "Hardy St. 14, $TOWN", he'll end up driving around the ring road for hours, but tell the pizza driver "Hardy St. 14, $CITY", and he'll end up at the other side of the city.
Most of the time we just say "fuck it" and order everything to be delivered at the gas station at Laurel St.
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Or use GPS coordinates. They have those too, right?
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Well, there's also a problem of actually spotting this road and driving into it. Or more specifically, driving out of it.
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Ah yes. I like driving invisible roads though!
It's like cat-eye trails, but in a car!
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Oh, I'm sure you'd love doing an effectively in-place 180 turn while also watching out for the metal clothesline pole Grandpa put in our yard when cars were still a novelty here.
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First of all...
Yes, fuck you.
Second, Telstra is still TRWTF.
I needed to log into my Telstra account. I use a password manager and for some reason it was refusing to log me in. I figured I must have saved the password wrong or something. So I clicked the "forgot password" link.
It asked me for my email - makes sense. Then it asked for my date of birth. I still don't understand how this is considered to be in any shape or form a secure method of identification but whatever. Finally it asked me for my phone number. Wow, they must really be security conscious at Telstra!
Yeah, right!
A minute later I get a text message:
Hi, your Telstra password is hunter1. Any queries, visit telstra.com/help
Yes, I do have a query in fact: Why in the flaming fuck do you keep passwords in plaintext you incompetent fucktards?!
By the way, the reason I couldn't log on?
CHAR[16]...
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the reason I couldn't log on?
CHAR[16]
...silently truncated on initial password entry, but not at logon. Another stellar feature from Telstra IT.
I did try to warn you.
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First of all...
Yes, fuck you.
You know it's bad when you see this picture and instinctively and instantly try to click on the "x" in the upper right corner.
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Why in the flaming fuck do you keep passwords in plaintext you incompetent fucktards?!
Hope you're using a random password with Last/Kee/1/${software}Pass
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Hope you're using a random password with Last/Kee/1/${software}Pass
Yes, luckily I am. That was actually a part of the problem - the autogenerated password was too long.
This is a very common problem that I frankly find rather scary. Even fucking Microsoft has a (IIRC) 16 character limit. Why?!
If you're going to hash the password (that's not really optional, Telstra...) then what does the length matter? Sure, I guess there has to be some limit for technical reasons but it should be like 50 characters, not 16!
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But
hunter1should easily fit into aCHAR[16]! Must have been some other problem.
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Even fucking Microsoft has a (IIRC) 16 character limit. Why?!
I doubt it, my onedrive password is about 20 chars long.
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I doubt it, my onedrive password is about 20 chars long.
Office 365 certainly does, at least it did a week ago.
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Microsoft Account did too when I changed the password a while back.
after getting hacked.
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is there a country where the broadband providers aren't ... incompetent
Well, officially there's only one nation-wide broadband / cable provider left in the Netherlands after the big two fused (yeah, apparantly that wasn't a problem with creating a monopoly, since there was stil a facsimile of competition remaining from ADSL providers...) and it's doing fairly OK.
Competence varies a bit depending on which call center your calls get forwarded to, but atleast there's no large scale WTF-ery as Deadfast delivered to us. Atleast none that would actually make the news, or make waves on the internet.
Oh... and they have an actual competent webcare team that's present on Twitter, Facebook and several forum websites dedicated to computer tech that will proactively step in when someone's complaining to quickly resolve the issue. +1
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officially there's only one broadband / cable provider left in the Netherlands
Not if you live in Zeeland. Well, that’s to say, there tends to be only one, but it’s not the one you were thinking of.
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Well, officially there's only one nation-wide broadband / cable provider left in the Netherlands after the big two fused (yeah, apparantly that wasn't a problem with creating a monopoly, since there was stil a facsimile of competition remaining from ADSL providers...) and it's doing fairly OK.
Apart from ADSL, there is VDSL and fiber initiatives all over the country.
LMGTFY - Let Me Google That For You
