My new friends in India

Some things get better as they get bigger. Salaries, for instance. Other things worsen. Companies rarely improve as they grow, and by the time they get to be multi-nationals you can pretty much rely on customer service being a high priority in the advertising and abysmal in real life.

About ten days ago I received a letter from Tiscali, my internet supplier, saying that they and British Telecom would be upgrading our network last Wednesday and that we "might" lose our internet connection for a couple of hours on that day.

Being off work that day I powered up the PC at around eleven a.m. No Connection. I checked the phone. Dead as a dodo. It still wasn't working by five in the afternoon.

I rang BT. Dialling their local rate number I was finally connected to a call centre in India. They tested the line and said it was working perfectly. I am not sure what strange sense of the word "working" they were using. I then rang Tiscali.

Tiscali also had their call centre in India. It may even have been the same one.

"You will have to get B.T. to test the line"

I told him they had, and nothing was wrong apart from the fact that it wasn't working.

"We will ask B.T. to check the line again. Wait until tomorrow and if it isn't working, ring us then".

Tommorrow found us still cut off from from the phone and the interweb.

Ticali "We have checked and there is a fault. We will have start a new broadband connection for you. This will take up to five working days."

I pointed out that there wasn't a fault until they caused it. I asked about a refund of my line connection fee for the time I was cut off.

"You will need to contact our billing department for that"

I did not dare ask which continent the billing department was on. It may even be manned by extra-terrestrials.

On the evening of the second day (oops, a bit biblical there) I checked the phone again. Still dead. I got my mobile and phoned myself. (I should point out that this is something which I do not usually do. Though I have been known to send myself emails as reminders.)

I phoned myself. And somebody answered. Considering that they had been getting all of our calls for the last day and a half they were very friendly. Mind you, they had plenty of time to answer because nobody who rang them on their number was able to get through.

They seem to have had quite a good time talking to total strangers. A strange sort of blitz spirit thing. My Mum spent quite a while talking to them.

It turns out they too were both BT and Tiscali customers.

I rang BT again.

"You will need to test your equipment. If we send an engineer round and the fault is with your equipment you will have to pay £65.00"

I got him to try and ring our number rather than test it. I dare say he had a lovely time talking to our patient and understanding fellow customers. He rang back afterwards and apologised.

We finally got everything working at lunchtime today.

Goodness knows if either company will give us a refund on the rental.

At least now I know what "a two hour break in service" really means.

And I did get to speak to some very nice people.