Dear BT....

After the high of last weekend, my ear to ear grin has been annoying everyone, even me. I needed something that would trigger my normally grumpy demeanour and bring me crashing back down to earth. Step forward British Telecom, a company seemingly devoted to infuriating and driving away its customer base. Given that it acts like the 'Fawlty Towers' of customer services, I thought it only appropriate to communicate with them in a reciprocal way.

Here is a letter sent this morning to Ian Livingstone - Chief Exective of BT.

Dear Ian,

Firstly, apologies for contacting you via letter. I would of course normally send you an e-mail but given the speed of the service you have provided over the last 3 months, I'm not sure that you or I would still be alive by the time it appeared in your in-box.

I did consider taking all of the equipment you have provided, along with the bills, flyers and assorted documentation that regularly fills up my paper recycling bin and setting fire to it all. I could then have sent this message through the medium of smoke signal but in the end I chose a more traditional and less drastic means of communication.

Over the course of the last 3 months, I'm pretty sure I have spoken to each and every one of your employees across the world and I am delighted to tell you that your globalisation programme has been a roaring success. Against all the odds and despite language barriers and cultural differences you now have a standardised service across all of your business units. They are now uniformly and unwaveringly useless, irrespective of location and function.

Despite hours and hours of trawling through menu systems, unnecessarily inputting my details into your automated systems (and then being asked to repeat them to each new person) I still find myself tortuously explaining the history of my problem to each of your many employees. The 'update' I must provide is now up around the ten minute mark, a routine I have now honed to perfection and take great pride in delivering. Unfortunately, my tale of woe is usually met with abject apathy or worse faux sympathy along the lines of  'I understand your concerns Mr. Leishman, we appreciate your patience and loyalty but let me stop you there, I'm going to pass you on to somebody who cares ever so slightly less than I do'. 


I have whiled away many hours within the purgatory that is your automated menu system, listening intently to the pre-recorded woman explaining how important my call is and how BT is committed to providing great service. I don't know who that Scottish lady is but I can tell you her lack of sincerity and her hollow promises have forced me to re-evaluate my opinion of the whole of Scotland. 


I now have a service which is worse than when I first raised a complaint several months ago. That in itself is a formidable achievement, particularly given the time and the resource we have both devoted to the problem. I'm almost reluctant to escalate any further for fear of what might happen.

I have met an entire army of your engineers over that period, vast swathes of them. In fact 'Coffee for BT engineers' now appears as a line item in its own right on my domestic budget. I have spent several days working from home, awaiting the latest engineer from whichever BT department has been blamed by the last one that attempted to solve my problem. I say working from home, I'm sure you will agree, working from home is a little challenging when your broadband speed is slower than glacial erosion. 

Your engineers have all been unfailingly courteous, professional and spectacularly unsuccessful in addressing my problem. The quality of chin scratching has though been particularly impressive along with the honesty displayed by one of your engineers, who when I asked him if he had a BT Broadband service, replied 'You must be f**king joking'. I laughed for a whole two minutes before realising he was being serious.

Over the last month, my problem has evolved. I have gone from having an unstable connection that disconnected sporadically to having no service at all. Given that I was one of only four people idiotic enough to sign up to your BT Vision TV service, I now have only basic TV services, the Digital revolution is now for me just a distant memory. In fact, I  am thinking of re-instating my old VHS recorder so that my wife can record Coronation Street. I now have to get in the car and drive to my sister-in-laws to send an e-mail which I think we can agree is not an acceptable state of affairs, particularly when I am sending the e-mail to her. That just seems silly doesn't it Ian?

The latest suggestion from your 'team' was to change the router which they would do for free if I signed up for another 18 months. Whilst I admire their entrepreneurship, I think you'll find if you check the copy of my birth certificate (enclosed) that the word 'Yesterday' does not appear against the column marked 'Date of Birth'. Instead, I went out and bought my own router and naturally it achieved nothing. There are as yet undiscovered lifeforms, clinging to the sides of hydrothermic vents in the worlds deepest oceans, that knew that my router was not the problem but desperation is a funny thing isn't it Ian?

I even tried to cancel my service this morning but was told that I would be in breach of contract and would have to pay four months worth of subscription for the privilege of putting myself out of my bandwidth induced misery. I can tell you that my appetite for doing that is broadly the same as it is for disembowelling myself with a teaspoon. So in complete exasperation I write to you to see if you can help.

I look forward to hearing from you. (by letter or on my wholly reliable mobile phone)

Regards

Alan Leishman

Ire

My weekend in the lakes may have provided some serenity and inner reflection but by the end of the week I'm pleased to inform you that my ranting muscles were being given a vigorous workout on an hourly basis. Just in case you think I've gone all soft and lost my inner rage, I present three examples of topics which have really cranked up my blood pressure this week.

This weeks niggles:-

• BT Broadband - I have spoken more to Rajish in their Indian call centre than I have to my wife this week. The nature of the problem means that each time I think it has been sorted, it reappears at a more inopportune time than the last. Consequently, I have achieved new levels of grumpiness. Were it not for the fact that Jeremy Beadle is dead, I would strongly suspect his involvement.
  
  Each occurrence involves a call to their support number, a navigation through their unfathomable menu system and most annoyingly the input of your telephone number and account number which is immediately followed by this dialogue.
  
  "Good morning BT, Could I take your telephone number and account number please?"
  
  "The one that I just entered into your menu system?"
  
  "Yes"
  
  "errr...I just entered it into your menu system"
  
  "Yes, sorry about that. Could I take it again?"
  
  I can tell you that the first time this happens it is mildly annoying, the second time I see red and by the third occurrence I am ready to disembowel someone with a spoon.
  
  There then follows a scripted run through of the 'morons guide to telecommunications' where I am asked to check several aspects of my installation. None of these aspects has anything to do with my problem and the futility of the conversation does make me feel slightly queasy and more than a little genocidal. I pretend to follow their instructions whilst sitting on the sofa, slurping coffee and pausing occasionally to add a sound effect. Eventually we arrive at an understanding that they are not going to solve my problem by following a script and I'm not going to solve anything through sarcasm.
  
  The upshot of my situation is that if I sign up for another 18 months contract, they will send me a new router for 'just' £49 which may or may not solve my problem. This solution is about as appealing to me as eating my own shit so instead I will seek a new service provider to argue with. 

• Gary Neville - The bum fluff moustachioed prick was this week appointed as replacement football pundit for Andy Gray on Sky. Presumably this announcement took so long because finding a character more odious and less likeable than Andy Gray is actually quite difficult.
  
  They must have really struggled as they elected for Rat Boy Neville, a man I would never, ever tire of punching. My level of contempt for this moron transcends my vocabulary and therefore I immediately and without hesitation cancelled my subscription.

• Oliver Letwin - I don't blog about politics as it is such a divisive subject but I will make an exception for this buffoon. Some people are born with a face that accurately reflects their personality, his face looks like a total dick. In a private conversation with Boris Johnson, this heinous waste of human DNA was alleged to have said that he did not want to see more families in Sheffield be able to afford cheap holidays.
  
  I may not come from Sheffield and I can certainly afford my own holidays but this really boiled my piss. As a punishment, I suggest he be immediately appointed the new Minister for Cheap Package holidays, a 21st century Judith Chalmers without the leathery skin. He should be packed off to review cheap, all inclusive package holidays for the rest of his career where he can hold focus groups with his 'subjects' where he explains why he wishes to deny them their annual two weeks in the sun whilst they take it in turns to pummel his torso.
  
  I hate package holidays but I'd sign up for two weeks in Torremolinos if it meant I got to see this berk get his long overdue comeuppance.  

Back in the 21st century....

Following our much delayed house move, we are now settled into our new apartment and very nice it is too. Though really stressful the process of moving was a bit of a catharthic experience in the end. Lots of stuff you dont need and had forgotten you had gets thrown away, lots of personal stuff you thought lost many years ago turns up during the move.

We have rented a place with an enormous amount of drawers, cupboards and storage areas. Therefore, I now have really specific drawers, I have a battery drawer, a bulb drawer, a candle drawer, a pens and things associated with pens drawer. Now if I could only remember which drawer belongs to which object I might be able to find something.

Thanks to the help from Mels parents there is not a box remaining. Everything was unpacked and everything has its place, even me.

We finally got reconnected to Broadband yesterday after I shouted at enough people in BT to finally get them to do something. We're now in the process of contacting people with our new details which is a shit job if I'm honest.

Just to finish off last weeks Pie story, six new improved sultana pies were delivered to me on Saturday directly from Hollands and having given them the thumbs up they are now going to replace the previous Mark 1 pies that I described in my blog of last week.