Yes, it's time for a good rant. Here, in darkest deepest Wales, we don't have much in the way of a televisual feast. Normal aerials pick up 3.5 channels. I refer, of course, to the 0.5 of a channel as S4C, which if you've ever seen it, is a truly dreadful, low budget imitation of it's English partner.Around the larger towns and cities, there exists cable. This is probably because one of the main call centres is in Swansea, and people working there can get a discount on their supposed service. We would get BT vision, but apparently this requires a broadband connection of upwards of 5Mb, and considering most exchanges around here are only on 3Mb sync rates, that's not going to happen. Plus, being BT, it's vastly overpriced, and crap.
That then leaves the multinational cess pool that is Murdoch's empire, Sky. We've had Sky 9 years. It's never worked properly. We started out paying £16 a month, for the basic package, which is all the channels except the premium ones, like the movies or the sport. About a month after Sky put in the equipment, our faulty box was replaced with a loan box, and the company that were repairing it went into liquidation. 18 months later, we get our box back, unrepaired. I have repeatedly had the sky engineer come here, spend literally 5 minutes realigning the dish, then leaving. This costs me (now) £65+vat, and 2 days later, the problem returns. I have so far replaced the box, dish, lnb and even cable, and yet the problem persists. In the last two days however, Sky have now excelled their previous levels of low quality. I now have 4 channels. Sky 1, 2, 3, and the welcome channel. The rest either work, but are very choppy and pixellated, or I just get "no signal is being received." I spent nearly two hours last night on the phone to them. The usual procedure of unplugging everything was adhered to, and when it didn't fix it, the engineer then hung up.
I was bouncing. I redialled, and got an extremely unpleasant young lady from India, and told her my woes. I was not abusive, I was also not impolite. I requested a conversation with a supervisor, and when she asked why, I told her. She then hung up.
Third time, and I get through to an exceptionally pleasant sounding Scotsman, who assures me something will be done, but I need to be put through to technical. I then get put on hold again for 10 minutes, only to then be told it's now closed (it was 11:05pm at this point) and to try again tomorrow. This must have meant they all went home whilst I was on hold.
Waining, I phoned again, and this time I got another Indian who told me I'd have to speak to technical, and to phone back in the morning. And so I shall.
But what really does me in is the fact Sky are happy to take your money, without providing any service whatsoever. So, think of me for the next hour, whilst I give them hell, or at least cancel (mind you, they don't care!).
