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It’s been four years since I moved back from Japan and I am still not used to the concept of ‘service’ this country has. We seem to revel in mediocrity with the odd beacon of hope shining in the darkness (thank you scan.co.uk, I appreciate you rising about the rest). In my job I like to think I will go the extra mile for a client. For example, over the last couple of weeks I have been sleeping with the mobile and switched on laptop by my head every night to help out a client whose aging hardware necessitated 24 hour care of their web site whilst a hasty migration was planned and carried out. I don’t get paid extra for this, I don’t get anything for it apart from a warm glow when people say thank you. This particular client phoned me at the end of the two weeks of hell to say thank you directly. To me, that is all we need to do. Communicate – take whatever action is necessary – and remember to say sorry and thank you at the right times.

It’s been nearly four months since I realised that my broadband speeds were more akin to last decade’s speeds. Ranting over the issues over the last three months would be pretty futile but here are some conclusions.

1. BT keeps no history of your fault. If you phone the (overseas outsourced) call centre for the fifth time you can still have the delight of being asked if you have changed your micro filters, rebooted the router, tried the BT speed tester etc etc, again and again.

2. In my case, the only cables in my village are BT, so there is no point in switching to a different provider as you’ll still get BT engineers if there’s a hardware issue. Now this will blow your mind. Any engineer that is sent comes with NO history of what previous engineers have done. NONE. I have been asked if *I* know what previous engineers have done. On top of that they must finish AND *close* the call within two hours. Yes, even if the fault isn’t rectified. Even if to rectify the call takes more than two hours.

3. They have a Twitter ID called BTCare. My latest update from them last night (as my broadband tops out at 60KB/s) and after I had stayed in again for my fourth engineer visit was

Testing your line, it confirms your line can only support max speed 500KB/s. initial test indicates your Broadband performing as it should

Er yes, I WOULD LOVE 500KB/s. That’s the whole reason I am complaining for the love of anything holy! So it appears that even @BTCare don’t have any access to history of a call. If I was them, I’d be sitting there, reading the history of calls, engineer visits, terrible download speeds etc and thinking – god, this is bad, we should do something about this. But no, looks like the new reaction is “We can’t see anything wrong sir”. Maybe they’d like me to replace my micro filters again. Or I could phone the BT help desk and they can ask me if I am plugged into the test socket.

4. BT have no concept that asking your customers repeatedly to be around for Engineer visits is actually not that easy. On at least one occasion I stayed in only to find out at the end of the day the engineer wasn’t going to visit and was working at the exchange instead. Once I stayed in to the last moment before I had to drive down south to pick my mother up. End result we ended back at Chester at 10pm instead of 5pm, and no, the broadband was still slow. On one noticeable occasion, Akemi had been in when the engineer visited, after we left we found broadband wasn’t working at all. This was traced back to the router not being plugged in again. The speed was fine for less than 24 hours after reconnection.

How on earth does anyone get anybody to pay any attention to an issue in this country? Do we have to take legal action? Report people to their official overseeing bodies? How much time does that take? Why on earth can’t I just say “There’s a problem” and somebody fixes it? Is it too much to ask for?

Update Sunday 26th July

Just been asked by BT:

I am looking into this further to see what the problem is.I hate to ask but have you tried usuall diagonstics,ie filters,router,test socket

Hahahahaha – bonk