The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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5:02pm on Friday, 13th March, 2009:
Anecdote
Having been promised a new router to replace the one that refused to contact mud.co.uk, I duly waited for it to arrive.
A week after it was supposed to have arrived, I duly sent off an email to BT complaining.
Two days later, BT duly phoned me and told me there were "irregularities" with my address. Hmm, that would be their record of my address, then, which works fine when they send me my bill.
Next day there was an email from BT telling me to phone some department or other.
OK, so here's some helpful advice for companies that tell you to phone some department or other: it's also useful to know what combination of "if you want to check an existing order, press 1; if you have trouble connecting to BT broadband, press 2; ..." to use. Naturally, none of the ones available fitted my problem, and I wound up speaking to someone in India who I knew wasn't going to be able to help, but might perhaps be able to forward me to someone who could help.
Another useful tip is that when you are bounced around between four different people in a call centre as they struggle to find out who you're supposed to be talking to, it gets a little tiresome to have to tell each and every one of them what your phone number is, what your address is, plus additional "security" questions such as how you pay your phone bill and what services you are paying for on your line.
OK, so there I was, yesterday morning, listening to the latest person in India asking me all this stuff following my fourth exposure to an irritating fragment of Mozart, when suddenly I found myself speaking to a Geordie woman. She was as surprised as I was that we were connected, but it turned out that she was indeed a BT call centre person, and could actually help me. I guess the people in India must have come good and figured out who I needed to talk to. Anyway, she said she'd send me a new router and it would arrive today.
Arrive it did. It's a combination router/hub/wireless device and it works like a dream. I can now access my mud.co.uk email again — yay!
I can also access all those sites that AVG's firewall was blocking. This isn't quite so yay: it's good that I can use handy web sites such as www.google.co.uk again, but bad that AVG have been spending hours trying to fix a problem that was to do with the hardware, not the software. Their Customer Service efforts have been magnificent, so I feel pretty bad that the problem was ultimately not their fault; then again, I did suggest that it could be the hardware and they assured me that it wasn't, so I do have a little mitigation on my side.
Hmm, maybe I'll give WoW a shot tonight, and see if I can last more than 30 seconds in Dalaran without timing out.
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Copyright © 2009 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).