Life as we know it was disrupted this week when our beloved telco withdrew its services from us and our neighbours. I’m not such a virtual junkie that I can’t survive being unwired for fun but when all your client records and systems operate in the “cloud” then an internet connection is essential. For a short while I felt like the day when our computer died without back up.
A few minutes bitching got my resident IT geek into action and I was up and running again using bluetooth and my mobile as a modem. I was back connected but still unwired. How clever is that? I was able to download all my files for the next days work and sleep easy.
There is no doubt that we have become reliant on technology. You don’t realise how much until normal service is interrupted.
When we were reconnected the next day I realised that it wasn’t the failure that bothered me but the treatment from the telco’s “customer service representative”. Admittedly it’s no life and death situation but it’s a big deal nevertheless in terms of inconvenience and hassle. Is it too much to ask for:
- Acknowledgement that there is indeed a fault – being told that they don’t know there is a fault because they can’t check the line. I know there was a fault because my phone line was dead.
- A small measure of emphathy – Oh dear, how annoying for you – would have been sufficient.
- A conversation in English – instead of legal mumbo jumbo and threatening me with charges is the technician comes out and finds I’ve left the phone off the hook.
- Some sense of urgency that they will indeed get on the case as soon as a technician is available – instead of we will endevour to rectify the service sometime between 7am and 7pm, AND, if it isn’t back working then to ring them back for another round of patronising drivel read from a script.
Luckily for them they managed to fix things. Our neighbourhood possie had a day to plot our next line of attack should that 7pm deadline have been missed. Oh what things had planned to say and do. Nothing that binds a community like a common enemy!
I feel your pain! We had nearly two weeks with minimal internet use – and If I cold connect, it was so slow that I wasnt able to actually download a page and do anything. NZ wireless are refusing to acknowledge that there was an issue – becuase they cant see it from thier end, and refuse to refund the unused portion of the $40 we paid them. So Im going to the CC company for a refund. Vodafone reckon that despite me not be able to get any pages to load – I used my entire allowance of 512mb in a week. If we can prove that they are wrong (!) they will give us another $30 credit.
All the while its the same old technobabble – which hubby loses patience with rapidly.
We also have an issue in the Wairarapa with frequent power cuts – and the line company one day came out with that “we will charge you if its your fault”. I made them check back how many faults we had reported in the previous six months, and then asked him how many had been our fault. And then as all of them had been their fault – why the hell were they being rude.