Hours on the line and several days just waiting at home for promised calls, all in vain

Y 2013 BT saga continues. At this stage, it’s not a technical fault, now it’s a support services failure. There is no excuse for being unable to call at a specified time several times in a row, especially when an automated caller dispatches formal reminders that those calls should be expected. It shows either arrogance or negligence.

For the uninitiated, my BT connection has been rocky since January of this year, leading not only to chaos with my professional and personal life (I am connection-dependent) but also to approximately a dozen hours on the phone (net total) with BT representatives overseas.

Diagnosis involved physical work from me too, all up to the point where actual engineers were sent to my house to address the issue by bypassing what might have been a faulty socket. It wasn’t conclusive. Why did it take BT so many months to send out engineers to the troubled site?

After the issue had been resolved I was promised that the supervisor (whose name I will omit) would discuss compensation with me. So I called up and spent a long time on the phone arranging for him to phone back (he was not working that day). I actually had to stay at home all morning and afternoon that day in expectation of that call. But he didn’t call. He must have ‘forgotten’. So then I had to call again — a call lasting about a quarter of an hour, with me addressing a person who never heard of my case at any time before and therefore had to spend time catching up. He said the supervisor would return a call but never said when. Apparently he phoned back when I was out (one cannot expect a person to be at home 24/7 by specifying no time, home is not a prison cell). Why did he not call at the specified time in the first place? This is becoming nonsensical, wasteful, and difficult for everyone.

So yesterday I had to spend another half an hour or so on the phone (a little less) only trying to get hold of the supervisor to get my compensation. So far I have spent nearly an hour just trying to get hold of the person who can issue the compensation. This is in addition to a dozen or so hours on the phone this year — hours spent in vain as they probably needed to send out an engineer to the house all along. Well, this is what it’s like being a BT customer. If your time has no value and your connections stability has no high priority, then BT might be fine. You will end up speaking to many different representatives, explaining your problem over and over again; solution can take weeks or months to be found, so satisfaction from the customer is clearly hard to attained.

The only reason I have not quit BT is that they kept making false promises that they would resolve the issue and changing ownership/management of the line to another company can take weeks in the UK (with wired connection being down). That’s the lock-in they have through landline. All I can do now is warn others that BT has very dysfunctional support services which fail to call back when they promise to call (this is not the first time they fail to phone back) and can’t send out engineers with equipment that can fix the problem because that may be ‘too expensive’ for BT (over the long run, not resolving the issue would prove even more expensive for both sides).

Update: the supervisor ‘forgot’ to phone again. This is at least the third time. It’s inexcusable. I called up with no anger but with a more assertive tone and got compensation, or so they claim (we shall see billing next month). I actually had to say that I would escalate this to their management in order to make real progress. It’s sad that being gentle and polite just doesn’t get things done. The supervisor, whose name I prefer not to share (for his own protection, which he may not deserve after repeated failure to call), tried to use the “I have been unwell” excuse for sympathy and mercy (fearing escalation to his superior), but why is he working then? Excuses for failures don’t make things any better, they make things worse. BT has a systemic issue in its hands and unless something is done about it, many other people will suffer the same way I suffered.

have bought a Google-branded ASUS device. It’s nice, but also not nice, depending on how one assesses it. As a technology rights person, it spooks me. The device is a privacy bomb. Everyone here ought to know that I’m a huge Android proponent and I wrote thousands of articles about it, tweeted about it nearly 10,000 times, and owned some Android-based gear before. On three separate occasions Google also tried hiring me, so my attitude towards Google is everything but negative. When it comes to privacy, it’s another matter altogether.

Like the Creative kit I bought on the very same day, this tablet works perfectly well out of the box. No complaints about the packaging, the components, etc. I love the USB charger. the tablet’s materials, the speed (essential for the decent voice recognition), and the screen, even though it takes a while getting used to, having moved from tablets twice this size.

To precede this informal review with a few words, all my complaints are about lock-down and spying. “Good hardware, ultra-crap privacy” is how I would summarise it. And this is where Google pushes computing. Subsidized hardware in exchange for lock-in is the business model.

The good points about this tablet are numerous. Good camera, quad-core processor with a nice package that’s metallic and quite light overall are only some of the many selling points.

The bad points are that it is too small (I prefer my other tablet, a 10.1-inch tablet), too limited, and also not so perfectly put together. No camera application installed by default to utilise the camera, which is a massive mistake. Development options are not present in Settings. Rooting not welcomed or made simple, either. But these are side issues.

Privacy is a total nightmare, trying to grab hold of the user’s identity all the time. Identify is demanded from the user even when not required, e.g. when going to native E-mail and even when opening a browser or trying to watch the image/video gallery. The purpose of this device is merely to drive data, traffic, and money to Google, thus it must be subsidised accordingly. Fair enough, but at what cost? Sure, Google uses this as a business recruiter without much pretense. The privacy issue has no excuses though. The first thing the tablet tries to do when switched on is insist very strongly on finding a wireless connection. it’s hard to even start using the tablet without completing this stage.

Google Play’s insistence on having a GMail account it also noteworthy. Google is making it hard to supply fake details. A real name is needed, but fake one can be given if one tries hard enough to find anonymity. Many widgets that give away location and such stuff by default make it easier for Google to guess who’s who. The insistence on geo-tracking is scary, but not as scary as remote backup of all the data, even private stuff (history on the Web, bookmarks, geo-location upon surfing, etc.). It is much worse than in my 4.0 tablet where these settings were inside the browser where toggling off was still needed. Well, now the browser reports clicks over the address bar, to name just one issue. The platform does not provide privacy at all. It is a lesson in how to get it all wrong on privacy.

Every Google Nexus 7 review should focus on privacy issues because that is what subsidies the hardware. The Nexus 7 has amazing hardware, but it’s extremely locked down such that not even development is available in it. It’s just a Google absorption vehicle. Chromebook Pixel must be similar, but it can boot into Ubuntu and Linux Mint, just like a real laptop, at least giving the option to everyone, so I recommended it today to someone who had planned to buy a MacBook Pro.

To summary, let it be repeated. The Nexus7 is SHOCKINGLY privacy-infringing in every conceivable way (more than I could ever imagine). It is not for everyone. I mean, a Google Plus account, which has absolutely nothing to do with the process followed in setting up Google Play, is being almost force-fed. The Nexus 7 has grotesque behaviour of tying. Want to install new software? Must open a GMail account, pushed to open G+ account too. The Nexus 7 can hardly even be started (from boxed state) without a wireless connection. I had to opt out from 10+ spying features one by one. Want to issue a voice command in Nexus7 ? Google will record everything. Open Gallery? Linked to Google cloud by default. Google even insists on remotely-controlled backup of entire tablet, not just bookmarks, history, photos, addresses… which is just shocking.

Google taught me how deep a privacy intrusion can get. And Nexus is where it all happens. Now I just try to undo the damage Google has done to a ‘vanilla’ Android installation. At least the hardware was cheap for its worth!

he title says it all. UPS brags about express services, but do not be shocked if it takes a month to merely get a service approved for dispatch. This is not a rant about prices but about bad service, bad procedural practices, and negligence. More recently their Web site turned out to have been dysfunctional due to bad programming. My latest correspondence with USP really covered much of what had happened, so I will paste it below and remove some sensitive details.

UPS:

[...]

Once you finish filling in all the empty boxes press the send button.

If you need any help please let me know and I will contact you to help you.

Roy:

I am Rianne’s husband.

Your Web site’s form does not work, neither with Chrome nor Firefox. It just jumps to the top when I press submit; I tried many times. My wife did too. It’s not that we don’t know how to use the site, we both have a degree in Computer Science. Our experience with UPS has been a *TOTAL* nightmare so far. Rather than express service my wife and I have wasted about 20 hours just trying to make a *VERY* simple import of a few pieces of paper.

I shall be writing about my bad experiences with UPS on my Web sites and I strongly urge you to get this service done ASAP.

UPS:

The form keeps on jumping to the top because you inserted ” ” in the contact person box. As it explains in the website you have to fill in the form without any signs or space- only letters. Also, the + sign at the beginning of the phone number should be deleted and then the request will be sent for sure.

Roy:

Hi,

I have just wasted yet more of my time. Your form is broken (see screenshot). Adjusting the values did not have any positive effect on submitting. The buttons don’t do anything, and it seems to be a result of bad programming at UPS. Maybe it’s some bad program who develops for only one Web browser; I don’t know and I don’t care as it’s sheer incompetence that will lose you many customers and waste you support hours.

Look, I have nothing against you personally, but USP ([your branch] at least) has turned out to be nothing but trouble. If someone was willing to really help ([anonymised] has been the ONLY person who really tried), then the import would have been done a month ago.

I am not willing to spend any more time on this. 20 hours by two people, lots of money spend faxing material which you then claim not to have received (what kind of business can call itself a business if it’s badly organised at the very basics).

My wife and I don’t lack the money for this service; we don’t lack the motivation to get done what needs to be done. We did everything that’s needed, but UPS is a procedural failure at many levels and I shall be expressing this sentiment online.

Thanks for wasting our time trying to get crucial documents. If you are willing and eager to really help, then you would assign this to someone who can just take the data and take responsibility for having this done. Having my wife sad and upset every other day for a month is not a possibility for me; I’ve got work to do here and I will spend no more time on it.

UPS:

Dear Roy,

I am sorry you feel this way but without this form sent to us via the website we cannot do anything about your request due to legal restrictions. There are still a few problems with your form and that is why it is not being sent

1. in the “Dimensions” box- take off the “cm” you wrote next to the numbers
2. in the “weight” box take off the “gr” next to the number
3. delete the 5$ declared value in the two boxes were you put it in
4. mark the “supplier” button where it asks you who should issue the invoice
5. at the last section “requested by”- please write your local number ([anonymised]) and not the international one

Once all of these will be fixed the form will be sent.

You have to understand that we not insisting on this just to make it harder for you- we cannot proceed with the request without this form filled in the correct way and sending it to us via the website.

I do not know what happened with this shipment before you sent us the request but once form will be sent to me I assure you that I will handle it today.

Roy:

My wife had filled it out correctly when she did but the form did nothing when she hit submit.

When I later did this in various Web browsers to replicate her problem I put some units in, but that did not in any way mean that the form got processed. When I hit “send” the page always jumps to the top again and does nothing.

I have made the amendments you suggested below, pressed “Send” and the outcome was precisely the same. No action, no feedback, just the page jumping to the top.

My guess is, someone did not develop this web form correctly.

I take your “assur[ance] you that I will handle it today,” but we are not there yet. Can someone at USP please fill this out? The form certainly does not work, not even with the validation of the data put in the boxes, and we’ve tried several browsers.

And here’s the screenshot I forgot to attach (form still doesn’t work).

UPS:

Hi,

I filled in the form for you and it sent it to our inbox- we are not usually allowed to do this but I am not sure what went wrong when you filled it in and there was no point to continue emailing about it
I will handle it now and send you the email with all the pickup and label details.

Roy:

Thank you, [anonymised], you are a good person and a good member of staff. I can see your sincerity in your response.

My comments about USP are addressed at a systemic issue; there is never, for example, a reason why my wife should leave the house and go to a place with a facsimile machine (fax) to send the same documents three times on three separate days. This take a huge toll, not just mentally but also on her job (which she needs to leave in order to do this). Imagine having to take some time off work three days only to discover that the recipient of the fax simply lost the paper, or being told on the phone that “they would phone back” and they always never do.

Regarding the form, it seems to me like whoever coded it is not a good programmer. I don’t know if it’s some Internet Explorer-only (and thus Microsoft Windows-only) form because I cannot check. My wife’s Android device and my computers just don’t work with that form; I filled it up from scratch three separate times.

I am telling you all this because I hope such information can be passed on and service can be improved so that future (prospective) UPS customers do not have to go through the same weeks-long nightmare that we have to go through.

I hope that from here onwards the papers will be processed with minimal burden on us.

With kind regards,

Roy

It should be noted that the above is just one ordeal among many. This latest one only wasted a couple of hours, but far more hours had been spent prior to that.

Update (3 hours later, same day): When UPS got threatened by bad publicity it finally took immediate action and the parcel was collected within hours, not weeks. The conclusion? Your time and your business as a customer don’t matter until it’s a matter of business risk (i.e. money) to UPS. I’ve made the following picture.

OR ALMOST a month now BT has been throttling speeds on its exchange, thus crippling/impeding connections, breaking what was previously working without issues. Interlacing and full capacity, they appear to have decided, can just arbitrary be disabled, disconnecting people with all their lives sessions at any time. When phoning BT — as I have done for about 3 hours over the past month (in total) — they acknowledge the issue, although their technical staff seems unable to even recognise the problem or communicate it properly (among peers), which leaves them having to issue pathetic compensation (also requires hours on the line) while continuing to throttle the connections. This is a technical issue at their end — one that they can address and resolve remotely, but why do they knowingly break their systems in the first place? They make a lot of verbal promises — hence not legally binding — only to break those promises and leave people like me wasting a dozen or so hours, incapable of doing proper work or even keep good temper.

BT are failing because their own traffic management systems are defective by design. Calling this inevitable error is like saying that accidents are OK because you feel like committing traffic violations. This was not the case in prior years. Why is BT crippling its own infrastructure at cost to the clients? Why are they abusing their monopoly on landlines? Maybe it’s time to really break this monopoly rather than hide it behind the fake impression of “choice”. They know that people cannot cease reliance on landline (bar mobile networks), so they continue to throttle connections to the point where people get none of what they paid for. They just get a sporadic connection and a headache.

NT is not so well known as a courier. Maybe it’s better that way. Nobody should ever use TNT as a courier. Their service is poor and they charge a lot for this very poor service.

Context of our 4-hour experience with TNT is as follows. After my wife had spent an entire morning trying to get TNT to get their collective behinds together I fired off the following polite message (at lunchtime):

I am writing on behalf of my wife, who wasted about 4 hours today trying to get your service to import a document, all in vain (the service was very unsatisfactory). When she used the E-mail address you gave her it bounced back with an error (see below). So I am attempting to send it from my own account. Please phone her to acknowledge receipt of this message with this form.

This is an URGENT MATTER.

Regards,

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz

Attached was the completed form, already nicely scanned and ready for action from TNT (where immediate service should be critical given their target customers).

Here is my wife’s original message:

To whom it may concern

I am not a client of TNT yet. Here is the information needed for me to do any transaction with the above courier.

No response all day. In fact, it bounced although it was sent to the correct address. The error received was as follows:

Reporting-MTA: dns;GBAHES628.ics.express.tnt
…
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Diagnostic-Code: X-Notes;… not
listed in Domino Directory

After wasting an entire day losing valuable time and suffering a bit of fury and anger (directed only at TNT) we decided to throw TNT where it belongs, or rather, throw some TNT at TNT:

My wife and I would like to cancel this transacting. Your service has been utterly appalling and the excuses very poor. Your staff is unable to communicate internally, so the explanation needed to be provided 5 times. The E-mail to your address, which you provided repeatedly, bounced back to the sender with the following message from IBM Domino (it had been sent from Yahoo!, which is no ISP/relay that should be blacklisted).

So, after forms and details had been prepared for hours this proved to be an exercise in futility. 5 times in recent months we used DHL and never have we had to jumped through such hoops and receive deficient service. TNT said they would call when the order is received, but no contact was made. In fact, rather than the customer coming first it seemed assured that we were way down the list because we are no Big Business which makes up a large source of revenue for TNT. Keeping the customers waiting in vain is worse than doing nothing at all. We will never do business with TNT again and we shall discourage others who ponder doing so.

Regards,

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz

If this post harms TNT’s reputation, then we are happy, not sorry. TNT deserves this.

hen BT goes down, it goes down big time. A year ago BT erroneously disconnected my line, which only took 3 weeks to restore [1, 2, 3]. Great job! This was rectified after I had contacted BT’s head of support and got someone to come around and fix it, then issue compensation. But even since then, it has been a bumpy ride too. Previously, it was down for a whole day, making any uptime statistics quite embarrassing for this giant telecom company (the customers were given misinformation regarding estimated time for restoration of service). This time not only does broadband go down (for a whole part of the neighbourhood) but the phone system too goes down, affecting a large area as well (several families and family businesses). Promises that the connection will have been restored by 5 PM (it went down a 8:15 AM) were more harmful than useful because they delay people’s reach for contingencies. It has been a day and a half and I still have neither a phone line nor Internet, which are vital to my jobs (I work remotely from home). Once again BT is very unhelpful, even on the phone. Ethnicity at the call centre is not a problem at all, but there is no personal touch, no appeal to authority, no way of actually making things happen; everything is very procedural. It’s like talking to a book. I spent about an hour in total talking to reps on the phone, I also left contact details for updates, but I never heard anything back. It’s like talking to a wall while being discouraged from talking any further (they say there is no need for me to call, which I guess makes sense since I don’t even have a working phone so I resort to using booths in the streets). It’s all very, very frustrating, with serious effects on jobs, personal life, and so on.

To have a contingency in such a case may help, but when time of arrival/restoration of service is unknown, then it sometimes makes sense to just go elsewhere for a while. With mobile broadband (dongle), once it’s used there is a bandwidth cap and a 30-day usage timespan, so even if it’s only used throughout one hour of downtime, it can be extremely expensive (one dongle can cost 25 pounds, 10 of which for credit).

The bottom line is, BT downtimes are extremely costly, they can be very lengthy, speaking to an actual person is a challenge and when the line too is down one needs to rely on a mobile phone, in which case the 0800 numbers are no longer free. I use booths instead, as waiting in the queues can make calls very long (like half an hour each, making the cost prohibitive on cellphones).

BT has been OK for several months (no downtime), but when it fails, it does damage that is quite serious. When the exchange falls down, as in this case, it doesn’t even matter what ISP one uses for Internet because BT has a monopoly on the line. It can take days for BT to address the problem, but why hurry? When there’s a monopoly on the line, who’s to compete on service quality?

Nothing is perfect and equipment sometimes gets damaged, but it’s unclear to me why it should take so long to fix, especially when a lot of people are affected. The telecommunication infrastructure these days is really vital to business and to personal lives, it’s not a mere luxury and a matter of entertainment.

The BT call centre says people will have addressed the problem only by Friday, but why the delay? When pressured to say if work is already done on the exchange, they said yes, but the building’s manager has seen not a single person from BT. It seems possible that BT reps say stuff just to get people off the line, making them optimistic in vain.

My phone line is down along with the Net. My neighbours have the exact same problem, but some are not even with BT as an ISP. This needs to be addressed more quickly. By Australian law, a company like BT would be ordered to also issue compensation in this case.