Bollocks!
Take BT today. A friend of mine (Mr. Jammy, curiously enough) has gone with BT Broadband, much to my objection. Well after much pussyfooting around, removing a single virus that was downloading itself as soon as he signed on the net, I finally got his system running happily. We had safely downloaded Windows Update, and I was in the final stages of downloading other stuff when for no reason except BT was bored, the DSL line died.
Ok, BT, what do you have to say for yourself? 150 is dialled and eventually I got some pleb who insists he is not trained to help and I need to call the 09063 helpline number at 50p a minute. Now... BT in their helpfulness have put a bar on all calls starting with 09 and so I can't phone their helpline. In the end they agree to put me through to their technical support, and I am talking to a delightful scotsman called Doug. He asks what I have done to check everything, and we conclude the only thing I haven't checked is the DSL filter. I have to phone him back, and when he says to just call, and ask for him, I suspect I'll get the wrong Doug so I ask his surname. He replies, "you don't need it, I'll be the only one."
Guess what. Well let me just say the finally tally of the call was something like "Hi, yeah, can I speak to Doug please?"
"I'm sorry, we have over 400 people here, and I don't know anyone called Doug"
/doh.
Eventually after much sweet talking (25 minutes to be exact) I get Doug, and he agrees to send an engineer. Only after warning me however that if the engineer can't find anything wrong, a bill of £120 plus vat will be issued.
"So you mean to tell me, that when you agree something's wrong, and it's an intermittent fault, you will send someone to fix it even though they might not find anything and might not fix the fault?"
"yes."
And this from a company that boasts they want to keep their customers, not drive them away. My mate has only been with them for 24 hours, and already he's having these problems.
If he'd gone with AOL he'd have not had these problems (!)
