Flog — Web super–hero in training

A week of bad (or UK) customer service

Wow… the ugly rumours of British customer service are true.

Moving house is always a hassle, but this week has been pretty extranordinary. I’ve recently moved into some more permanent accomodation in London, just a stones throw from the Thames in Surrey Quay, and it has been absolutely painful.

Being a web developer means I have a physical addiction to network connections; take me away from an RJ45, Ethernet, 802.11 or GSM signal for a day or so and I start to get the shakes. I’m often mistaken for a recovering heroine junky on family holidays.

So the first port of call for any new house is to organise the internet connection. So, long story short, after 5 days of ringing BT to organise them to connect my phone line back up I have yet been able to place an order due to their “systems” being down… what ever the fuck a “system” is… these people have forgotten how to use a pen and paper to take orders?

How does a company survive without taking orders for 5 days?!

By this stage I’m getting cold sweats, so I crawled on into the local Phone4U store to buy a wireless 3G modem to hold me over.

The 3 Network isn’t actually too badly priced (especially in the recent revelations of Vodafone NZ’s raping of its tech-savy iPhone customers); £50 for the modem on Pay-as-you-go, and £15 for 3GB of data (and no regular monthly cost).

Another long story short, after buying it and strugling to get a connection all day I took it back to the store, another 2 hours talking to them an sitting on the phone to 3 I’ve finally got it replaced.
At one point the sales guy literally got up and left, told me to take care of the phone, and if the 3 network guy came back from on-hold to take over… wow.

My Kiwi friend (and new arrival in London) who works in retail was just sitting there silently stunned at it all. He assures me back home you’d be getting a good bollocking from the manager right about then.

So 5 days after moving in, still no phone line, no broadband DSL in sight, and no running hot water.

And it’s raining.

(I’m getting into this moaning Pom thing quite well I think)