I do apologise for regular BT posts but I need to keep this fiasco documented so that when I phone Ofcom and Consumer Direct shortly, I have a record of the whole picture.

Our line is back on.  Hooray!  33 days offline for an online business has been nothing short of disastrous.  This morning, I got a bill for £136.30. This seems a little steep for 2.5 weeks of not even using a telephone (we only use the line for broadband).  It didn’t say what the bill was for, but it was a reminder and it stated that we HAD to pay it now.

I telephoned the supposed manager who is dealing with our case only to find that not only does she not give a flying duck, but that she, as a manager, has no access to bills.  WHAT?!

So, I calmly explain that I want to clarify the package we have been put on.  It should cost £11 per month.  Can she please confirm that?  She said I would have to talk to billing.  I said that there was no way on God’s green earth that I am going to speak to their billing people EVER again.  I wanted her, as my allocated manager, to sort the whole fiasco out.  You have no idea how reluctant she was.

She asked what the bill was for.  I said “I HAVE NO IDEA.  IT DOESNT SAY.”  “Well it must do?”  “Well trust me, it doesn’t.”  I then proceeded to read her the whole bill from top to bottom.  She said “Yeah you really need to talk to billing to avoid getting cut off again”.  I almost hit the roof.  I said that she would have to talk to billing IMMEDIATELY and find out what on earth is going on.  I said that if I was cut off again I would be spitting feathers (as if I am not already?!)

I finally got her to reluctantly agree to make some enquiries for me and I am awaiting a callback.  I asked where our compensation claim had got to and she said “Oh haven’t you had a call yet?”  “NoOOOooOO.”  I said, feeling like I really ought to spell it as well just in case she hadn’t understood it the first time.  “Oh that’s funny I have a different number here to the one you’re now giving me?!” She says, as if it is MY fault.  You’re a FLINKIN’ telecoms company and you can’t even get my phone number THAT YOU INSTALLED right???!  ARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And relax.  Let’s see what happens next.

Look how well Twinkle is doing after her accident!!  She is now walking and sat on my knee for the first time yesterday!  She has to have the lampshade on for one more week and then a further week in the cage (boooo!) but we are letting her out for short wanders as she gets very bored.  She cannot jump yet and her legs are still quite wobbly but I am very proud of her.  I wish Monty would come home.

This blog is where I tend to gather all of my personal thoughts and reflections.  However, if you fancy looking at what I am up to at work, check out www.pinkskydesign.com/blog

Do you ever have those thoughts like “What is beyond the universe?” and “I wonder why God made a funny world full of people?  What would be here if he hadn’t?  Would he have made something else?  Would we exist as something else that couldn’t think or speak or do stuff?” or “Can you +1 to infinity?”  etc.  I get them quite a lot and here is today’s.

The internet (II) has changed the world.  The first iteration of the web allowed users to receive information, much like a newspaper or magazine, but on a screen.  The new iteration has revolutionised the world by allowing a two-way stream.  Users can both be the receivers and purveyors of information.  Companies can no longer influence by making statements without receiving feedback.  New forms of media such as online polls, forums, social networking, business networking, blogs (where Joe Bloggs – haha – can have a voice that can be heard across the whole world) and mass-collaborative efforts are making a huge impact on us all.

This approach has drastically altered culture.  Record labels are struggling because musicians no longer have to be signed and squeezed through their dictatorial system because music can be downloaded.  Not only that, but unsigned artists can be listened to online (MySpace), people can collaborate on tracks all over the world (MacJams) and do all kinds of crazy things.  Proprietary software companies are struggling because an Englishman joins with a Chinese man and a Turkish woman to create new software.  Imagine what impact this mass-collaborative effort could have on other areas such as medical research, crime prevention etc!

However, there are negatives.  Volume also equals dilution.  Sometimes, there is so much music out there, it is hard to filter the excellent from the abysmal.  Sometimes too many cooks spoil the broth in software creation.  Sometimes the voices that are allowed to be heard are the voices that should not speak.  Where do you draw the line between the internet being a mass-democracy and a damaging influence?  for example, forums are great until a forum encourages somebody to commit suicide or an act of terrorism.  Online chat is great until a 14 year-old ends up getting raped by a 45 year-old because they both lied about their age and possibly even their sex. How do we put brakes on the internet or regulations that make it safe?

I was looking at Facebook today and the “News Feed” comes up on my home page, i.e. what everyone is doing.  Someone says “John Smith is going to bed, night all!” whilst another says “Mary Jones has woken up too early – here’s to another day”.  On the internet, time doesn’t really exist.  This is because John and Mary live in different countries and different time zones.  It is as though the internet has dissolved the boundaries of time.  I can chat instantly to someone who is living in tomorrow or yesterday.  Does that mean I am now living in tomorrow or yesterday (or even both at the same time?!?)  Or am I in today?  See?  Brain is hurting.

It got me thinking about how God exists outside of time.  This had previously been a ‘brain hurter’, but that now makes a bit more sense, only instead of the confines of the date line, God has the entire date line.  Cool huh?

To add to my list of words that people just get wrong: A lad in Sainsburys today got on the phone and asked somebody where the “coldslaw” was.  I think you’ll find that it is “Coleslaw” and that on your mouth you get a “cold sore”.  I dread to think what a combination of the two might look like?!

Well BT have made a fine mess of things here.  As predicted, I received a call at 11am from the engineer who was coming out between 8 and 12 to say that he was at the wrong address.  Turns out that this is where our mail has been going too!  You’d think that given that they’d got this wrong last time, they might have updated their records.  You’d think wrongly.

So, as predicted, he’s been sent to a job at 14 High Street and couldn’t come a few metres down the road to 14 Berkeley Mews, High Street.  I said “Please can you just come and talk to me?” So he did.  I got the usual spiel about him working for Openreach and not BT – yet another measure put in place to ensure that BT cannot deal with problems.  He was a good bloke though and ended up arguing with his boss on our behalf, saying that he could in fact fit the line, he just needed authorisation.  He even said it was a “right bl**dy c*ck up”, which was just about right.
After 1.5 hours of faffing, we had a new line.  He has told us that they insist we are 29 the High Street, so we are not to expect any mail.  Great, it starts all over again.

I called 02 to ask if they would re-instate our broadband.  Now 02 are actually very helpful with their BB customer service.  They told me that BT had not just removed the BT broadband package that we didn’t order, but also removed the capability for the line to have broadband on it.  So 02 have had to (at their expense) send an engineer to the exchange to rectify this, meaning we have been offline for a further 6-10 working days.  Excellent.

In the meantime, we have a compensation claim going through at £250 per day.  Will we get it?  Yeah right.  Still, here is the email, documented.  Note the bit that says that Pam does not have the authority to issue “ANY” compensation.  This will be the case I fear.
Dear Mark

I was sorry to hear of your BT experience regarding the ceasing of your line and broadband.   As a design company I fully empathise with the situation where your broadband is critical  and the amount of business that must have  been lost during this unnecessary process.

I have raised an issue with our Complaints/Service Team Ref: 16897 today and put a case forward for relevant compensation.  I do not have the authority to allocate any compensation nor any value of that from this office but this issue will be picked up by one of the complaints team who will contact you shortly to bring this to a satisfactory resolve.

In the meantime, I would like to apologise on behalf of BT for the inconvenience caused.

With regards

Pam

Pamela Cox
Service Manager

BT Local Business
represented by  Leading Edge Group (UK) Ltd

You may or may not know that the Turners are on the move again.  Our landlady is selling our house and so yet again, I find myself packing boxes, for the 5th time in 4 years.  We had a right faff on Friday, we’d found a place to move to and wrote our one month’s notice letter.  However, when I spoke to the letting agent they said that once we had gone past the 12 month contract, we were automatically put on a periodic contract and that somehow this meant that we had to give notice from the date that we moved in (in our case 20th of the month).

This didn’t make sense to me.  We changed the day our rent goes out to 1st and paid the difference.  Did this mean we had to give notice on 20th and then pay the difference again? Or do we give notice on 20th and actually end up giving two months of notice when we can only hold a new place for up to one month?  The whole thing was ridiculous and I told them so very politely.  I asked if it was a legal requirement and they said they didn’t know.  I also said that since we were no longer bound by the 12 month contract that we signed, how could it stand?  I was told that I had signed a 12 month contract that clearly stated that we would be put on to this periodic agreement.

Unfortunately for the agent, we check contracts meticulously before we sign them. We usually end up having to ask them to remove or amend various bits which have simply been worded carelessly but that could, if we signed it, leave us in a predicament.  For example, one contract we didn’t sign, stated that we may have cats, but that the landlord may, at any time and without any given reason, change their mind about this.  We asked what we would be required to do with our cats if the landlord woke up on a whim one day and decided he didn’t like them anymore.  We asked them to change it to state that they must have  a (pretty good) reason.  Anyway, we had done a similar thing with Errington Smith.  There was some clause that was worded badly that we asked to have removed.  Sadly, they removed the notice period as well!  Ooops.

We wrote to the landlady and said that legally (we checked), we were not required to give any notice at all, but that in the spirit of good tenancy, we would like to give one month.  As it happened, she was very grateful because the agent’s story was very different!!  When she rang them to ask why on earth there was no notice period in the tenancy agreement (we could have pushed off the next day if we’d wanted to), they told her that legally they are not obliged to state one because she had not specified one herself at the time.  A change of tune methinks.

Anyway, the upshot is, that we have found a flouse to live in.  I think it is REALLY cool.  JT is warming to it but most people I tell about it think I am bonkers.  So I thought I’d try to explain it with a few pictures.  It is located above a jewellers in an arty area of Cheltenham.  You go through a back gate and up an alleyway past a house with MASSIVE wooden doors.  They are beautiful.  You then go in through an entrance which is shared with the jewellery studio.  You go in through the front door and up some stairs to the master bedroom:

This bed is being removed…  You will notice, if you look carefully, that the ceiling is an interesting artistic attempt at some sort of tent!  Odd. Never mind.  Round the corner to the right of the image is an alcove and another wardrobe.  This bedroom leads into the most awesome en-suite bathroom:

This bathroom is being painted and tiled.  I am looking forward to lying in the bath and looking at the stars.  Luckily this window is only overlooked by our kitchen!!  To the right of the image is a cupboard with the washing machine in it.  Behind the photo is a toilet. So yes, the bathroom is actually bigger than this!

If you go upstairs you reach a sitting room:

I love this room.  It has a funky fireplace and a bay window seat that overlooks the Suffolks.  How cool?  You then go up some more stairs and reach a second bathroom (shower room really) and kitchen:

The main appeal of this kitchen was that you can actually fit more than one person in it!  Behind the photo is a window and a small table with chairs and some shelves.  You go up yet more stairs and reach the second bedroom:

This is a good size with more wardrobes and a nice view again, out over the Suffolks.
So there is our flouse.  We hope.  We are holding it tomorrow and moving 4th March.  It is just amazing what is on the rental market at the moment.  We have seen some places that are just uninhabitable!!  There is bad quirky and good quirky.  This is good quirky.  A flat where you would struggle to fit a single bed in the bedroom let alone a super-king, with a kitchen that you have to walk through sideways and a toilet that you have to reverse onto because it is down the side of the bath is bad quirky.  We saw a load of places that cost about £650 a month, that were tiny, dirty (not just in need of decoration but actually dirty) and not very nice.  The agents stand there being all cocky saying “Well you’re not going to find anything better!”  as if we’re lucky to get a home at all for that price.  Crazy times.  One place we looked at was ridiculous.  You walked through the front door and you were in the sitting room, which was about 2.5 square metres (seriously!)  There was then a kitchen the same size and a ‘reverse onto the loo’ bathroom.  Upstairs were two ‘bedrooms’ that, again, wouldn’t fit our bed.  The old lady who lived there was a chain smoker so it all smelt lovely.  She had also probably just died there.  £650 PCM.  Unbelievable.

Emma’s gorgeous baby Oliver is competing to be the new face of Snug Baby!  Please take 2 seconds to vote for him by clicking on the little red heart here.