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Wednesday 27th May 2015

4563/17492
It’s been Hell for me with no proper internet connection, so I was super excited when the postman delivered my new hub a day earlier than I was expecting. Even though this coincided with the start of my morning hour for work (I then would have an hour of baby care) I thought that it would be five minutes setting the thing up and then BANG, back on the internet with all its wonders. I’ve been tethering off my phone but it’s not the same and if I want to watch specialist videos (for my many hobbies - the main one being masturbating) then that would use up all my allowance in one go.
I made sure the new hub was set up in the same way as the old one and was delighted to see the light turn blue, rather than stay red like my old rubbish broken one and then I went downstairs to surf the imaginary waves of delight. But the new server wasn’t showing up in my list of networks. I went back upstairs, checked the connections, turned things on and off, but still even though the hub seemed to be active, as much as I squeezed the internet no juice was coming out.
I rang BT to see if I had done something wrong. The lady I got through to was pleasant enough and well versed in that way of talking that is designed to keep things calm, but which I find mildly patronising and infuriating, “I understand that your problem is that your server is not showing up in the network list. Is that correct?” Yes it is, like we established 15 minutes ago. She made me do some of the things that I had already tried, to no avail and we attempted a reset (but as with the last hub this did not work). Had BT responded to my faulty hub by sending me another faulty hub (with a different fault to keep things interesting) or had I done something stupid? 
The lady wanted me to go online to check my home hub settings, which was slightly tricky as of course I had no internet. “I understand that it is a problem that you want to get on the internet when you have no internet”. I tried using the tethering to get into the sites, but my mobile provider, perhaps wary of helping a competitor did not allow me to access those sites. “Can you go to a neighbour and use their internet?” asked the woman, which I couldn’t because a) I live in London and thus don’t know my neighbours well enough but b) I am in my dressing gown and looking after a baby and I don’t think it’s too much to expect at least one in two home hubs to work. So I was trapped in a kind of time warp. I couldn’t get on line because I had no internet and I couldn’t get internet unless I went online. I explained that I needed the web for my work, that I had already lost three days of access and that they needed to sort it out. I was also pretty tired and grumpy after having been up through the night at various intervals to care for my daughter. I had been feeling happy and ready to work, but now an hour had passed and I was tired and trapped in a modern Sisyphusian nightmare.
I was pretty much ready to lie down and die or at best lie down and accept that I would never get to go online again. It might be a good thing.
I told her that she would have to send an engineer to sort out this problem but was told that BT don’t send engineers for cases like this. There was literally no way that this was ever going to be sorted.
But it was Wednesday and mindful that I have a Metro column to write by the end of the week I told the lady that I would probably write about this in the paper. She didn’t seem too perturbed, but I asked if I could speak to her manager and after a few minutes I was given another number and told that they would sort out an engineer. You too can get this kind of service and all you have to do is get your own column in a newspaper.
But perhaps my column isn’t the terrifying colossus that I thought it was. I am pretty sure I was just given the number I had rung originally and had to go through all the same options (I don’t know my own phone number and couldn’t access my online account to find my account number which made these things even trickier) and I just got through to a second confused operator who I had to explain everything to again and who asked me the same kind of questions and who told me that they couldn’t send out an engineer. 
By now I was tweeting about the event and @ing in @btcare who did seem more keen to take my threats to write about them a bit more seriously. The man on the phone, desperately trying to stay polite in response to my increasing agitation said he would send out another hub that would be with me within two days. “What if this hub is faulty too?” I asked, though he seemed to find that idea ridiculous in spite of the evidence. I could see we might get to a situation where I was just being sent hub after useless hub and might be able to craft them into some work of modern art (or modem art as someone one Twitter suggested) about the redundancy of the technological age. By now I was worn down enough to accept that this was the best I could hope for, even though the first lady had promised this second guy would sort out an engineer. But the people on the Twitter account, who seemed more tuned into the bad publicity that this might give them were more helpful (though they sent me the wrong link to their email page, which I couldn’t use because I didn’t know my account number) and eventually rang me, agreed that getting another hub was probably not the bet solution and organised an engineer to come tomorrow. This had only eaten up two hours of my day. And that’s getting the special service dedicated to journalists who are going to write articles about the company.
I have been with BT all my life, and it’s a relationship that I’ve wanted to work out, but that the other party doesn’t seem to really care about. But it’s probably time to move on to a new life with a partner who at least pretends to respect me. The problem is that it seems all the broadband providers are equally crappy. Whenever I criticise BT on Twitter (which is quite a lot) I get tweets recommending other services, but also slagging off all the other services. I feel slightly sorry for these companies, until I remember how much they charge and that it’s really their job to make sure their stuff works. But if I really want to enter a vortex of pain the Post Office now do home broadband. Someone told me they have a special offer if I get in before June 7th. But I just can’t see me getting to the front of the queue in that time.
In the evening the second guy who had told me that I couldn’t have an engineer rang me, sounding quite grumpy about it, saying that they would be sending an engineer. I told him I knew already which didn’t make him any happier. He was rightly confused about why I was getting special treatment. I’d like to say it was because he was in a call centre in India where I am not such a big name. But I have a feeling he might not have been.


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