HOW NOT TO RUN A TELEPHONE COMPANY?
This is the sorry tale of how not to run a telephone company and one that has caused me enormous stress; indeed, at one point I was close to losing the will to live.
The whole sorry saga started in April, I believe the 11th when we first contacted Vodafone to inform them of a fault on our line, whereupon they asked us to perform various tasks, including the semi dismantling of our box which the router and phone line are plugged into.
After much fuffing about we found that our Broadband was slow and we had no telephone dialling tone whatsoever but as this was in the middle of the Covid 19 crisis, there was no chance of getting anyone to repair it, so we left it, feeling lucky that at least we had the internet working albeit slowly.
We left the box in its semi dismantled state as we had children working from home and didn’t dare touch the box for fear of losing the internet altogether but finally when the Covid situation seemed to be getting better I decided to contact the supplier to try to sort out the faulty telephone line.
I was unable to find a telephone number with which to contact them so had to resort to contact through their messaging service, little did I know how long and arduous this process would be.
Unfortunately, the transcript is far too long to put on this post as it took in total some 2 hours 39 minutes, however if you’re feeling masochistic or want a good laugh, along the lines of Victor Meldrew I can email it to you should you send your email address; I might have had an easier time had I taken on the task of pushing water uphill.
I was rather hoping that at the end of this marathon session, someone would rush round and fix the telephone with some degree of speed but this was not to be; I received two telephone calls from what I assume was the maintenance side of things which bizarrely seemed to ring of each time I tried to answer.
This may have been my fault as my old mobile had chosen to disintegrate and I was not yet used to the new one I had purchased to replace it; however, I phoned them back expecting to book an appointment for someone to come and fix the phone; little did I know that this would entail another 1 hour conversation to manage to persuade them to send someone to fix it.
A day or so later a very pleasant chap from BT (or whoever is responsible for the line) came round and having assessed the problem set about changing the box which the telephone and the router plug into as it was faulty.
One of the problems of getting older is looking back on the golden era when thing used to make sense, when you could phone up to inform your supplier that your telephone was faulty and they would send a man round to repair it. When written down like this, it all seems so obvious, what a shame that it doesn’t seem that obvious to my supplier.
As a small post script, some of you may have noticed I haven’t posted for a few days, this is because I have spent the time uploading my new book which I wrote during the Corvid lockdown to Amazon; when I’m happy that I have it uploaded correctly I shall put up the details so you can all rush out and buy a copy!
The Diary of a Country Bumpkin 
Congratulations on finishing your book! I got sidetracked back in May and am stuck at 2/3 way through first draft with no hope of picking it up again soon….
You can’t get that far through and not finish it, look at the glow of satisfaction you will have when you upload it and become available for sale. I know how easy it is for life to get in the way of these things, I wish you well to finish the book.
I had 44,000 words done by end of May so I definitely won’t abandon it after putting that much work into it, but am preoccupied with an art show at the moment, (my mothers art, not mine), so it got pushed aside…..and then it’s summer so we have to appreciate the weather while we can!
I’m so glad you wrote this -Vodafone is the provider of my mobile and I’d had been contemplating moving over to them with my landline.
Sorry, trigger happy! I hadn’t finished writing the previous and was still in the process of editing/rewording the first line!
I will stick with BT.
Following an electrical storm my landline and broadband died. I’d unplugged some equipment but not all. A couple of days later BT sent out an engineer (they’d just restarted house calls). New internal wiring was needed. And because the fault was on my property I should’ve had to pay for this, but the lovely engineer worded his report so that I didn’t need to. Next time there’s a storm I will remember to unplug everything.
I wasn’t joking about emailing the entire transcript of my email conversation, except for the fact that it’s 12 pages long I would have put it in the post. It seems utterly ridiculous that it took three and a half hours to get a man round to take twenty minutes to fix the problem but this is the problem with foreign call centres. Having said that I had a direct debit taken wrongly from my account and phoned up the band this morning and spoke to a very pleasant woman from Liverpool who put the money back into my account straight away, oh if everything could be that easy. I’m not sure if this is any use, but you can get surge protectors which protect your equipment should there be a surge so you don’t have to unplug things when there is a storm etc. There are quite a few different models, here is a link to one of them. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bochamtec-Adaptor-Protector-Current-Protection-white/dp/B07TR5W1GX/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=surge+protector+plug&qid=1594910277&sr=8-5
Sorry that should be BANK not BAND, I wasn’t speaking to The Beatles!
Thank you Joe. The BT engineer told me that BT don’t include a built in surge protector inside their routers, but luckily I’d unplugged it and the computer. It was just the internal wiring that was affected and that goes to a sealed box
Thank you for the information, I’ll follow it through to see if any of it will help.
I had a computer damaged by a power cut coming back on which caused a surge so now I have quite a few things covered by them. If your surge actually damaged the actual wiring of the house it must have been one hell of a surge.
I once lost a hard drive to lightning so usually cautious. I didn’t think the storm was that bad, but obviously, I was wrong.
You got me worried, I have just been round checking everything is protected. There’s nowt wrong wi’ belt and braces!
Nowt wrong atall wi that!