Before I descend into a massive rant, let me preface this post with this: I hate BT. I always have, and I probably always will. They are generally the most incompetent, uncooperative company on the planet.
Let me take you back to October 2011. I was perusing the BT website looking for BT Infinity - their brand name for up to 40meg VDSL. I popped in my postcode and was told that I was in a trial area for FTTP at a stonking 100meg. Obviously I thought about the pain I was letting myself in for, having to deal with BT, but I was sure that I could cope with it if I was getting such insanely fast Internet at the end of it.
If only I knew how painful it was going to be.
My first install date was in November. This was cancelled a couple of days before the appointment with no real reason given. The exact same happened in December (that’s two days of holiday wasted now, if your counting). I was then given an install date in January. Cancelled. I was told they needed to dig through a neighbour’s garden. I live on the corner of the street and the BT manhole is literally outside my front door, and the cabinet is on the opposite side of the road - so basically BT told me a great big fat lie (the final fibre did indeed go to the manhole cover, so they were absolutely lying to me).
February comes around, and I get another appointment. I was fully expecting this one to be cancelled as well. The day came, and with no word from BT to the contrary, I thought I was finally going to be able to have my lovely fast Internet connection. 9am came and went. 10am. 11am. I was starting to get worried. 12pm. Still no sign. After 1pm passed, I gave BT a call to see what the chuff was happening. “No one is scheduled to come to you today” the person on the end of the phone tells me. But I have an email and a text message confirming the appointment I say. “Computer error” the person tells me. Bloody great, I’ve wasted a (third) day’s holiday because they can’t make their computers work properly. At this point, I’m livid. If there was a BT monkey within grabbing distance, I’d have throttled them. I ask to speak to someone so I could make a complaint.
Magically, this improved the service I got (a little bit anyway). I started getting update calls most days. March rolls around, and they’ve finally completed the outside digging, and they make an appointment for a man to come around and install the modem. The chap arrives at 10am, and it all looks like its going well. He announces that he’s finished and now we can test it. We just need to wait for a little green light on the modem to stop flashing and we’re away.
It keeps flashing.
It kept flashing for over a week.
On Thursday, it stopped flashing, so I plugged the modem into my network, and it worked! I was getting insanely fast speeds, way more than I was paying for - I was really happy with it. I got a call from BT on Friday saying they’ve found the fault and would like to come over and finish the install. “No need!” I tell them, I’ve got it hooked up and it’s Internetting like a champ. The man says that’s fantastic, and that he’ll close the order.
An hour later I got an email and a text message telling me that an engineer was coming on Monday.
Oh dear.
Having had a day of woe at work (several servers deciding to throw their toys out of the pram at once), I called them the day after. “The appointment can’t be changed Mr Gilbert. You were told about it yesterday (lie #2 if you’re counting). You have to have an engineer look at it. We can’t close the order without someone making sure its ok (lord knows how I’ve managed this far if I can’t tell when an Internet connection is working!) No, you can’t have a weekend appointment.” I was fuming at this point. I categorically told the lady that after four months and four wasted days of holiday, there was no way on this earth that I was taking another day off for something that clearly doesn’t require an engineer to come and poke at my networking kit.
My complaint and order remain open. (I do at least have BLOODY FAST INTERNETZ!!!!!1111!!!!!!!)