I took a rather crippling loan from the spoon bank to attend BendyToo's 21st birthday this weekend.
Happily I love the hot weather so I'll be recovering in the sunshine for the next few days.
Less happily the tides are very low this week so I won't be doing any of this
Only a bendy person would have their arms/hands in such a strange position as part of normal movement!
If any readers of this blog would be interested in contributing to a project to help improve the way companies provide services to disabled people could you please email me on:
benefitscroungingscum@hotmail.co.uk
We are really looking for contributions from those with disabilities or people who care for someone with a disability
Thank you!
On Wednesday morning at precisely 6.46am I was startled awake by a loud drilling type noise. Somewhat confused I stumbled off to the loo, dislocated a few joints, threw oxycontin down my throat and got back into bed, completing the exciting ensemble by putting in some ear plugs. I figured that with the good weather the builders working next door had started early. There was no more noise and I woke in a better mood a couple of hours later.
When I woke for the second time I thought it was a bit odd that I couldn't hear any building works, but thought if they'd started that early it was to avoid the heat. Or something.
Later in the day I asked the builders if they'd started work early. They said no, in fact they'd been later than usual. When my neighbours came home from work I asked them if they'd heard the noise, as it had been loud enough to shock me awake I assumed other people must've heard something. The neighbours hadn't heard anything. They thought maybe I'd got the time wrong as their son fell down the stairs very loudly about an hour later*, but I'd not heard that, probably because of the ear plugs**.
It was, frankly, all a bit of a mystery. I knew there'd been an actual noise as opposed to my dreaming it because Bendycat had also woken up but I was no further along in finding out what it had been. The builders had suggested perhaps the garage in the next road had been working early, and in the absence of any other reason I thought that must be the case.
Until about 6pm when I went to get something out of my bedroom. There are lots of loose floorboards in this flat. I've placed my bedside chest of drawers over the loose floorboard in my bedroom as it was previously loose enough to trip me up. The weight of the chest of drawers means that every time I go into my bedroom it sets off my touchlight alarm clock, but doesn't trip me up. Seemed like a reasonable trade off to me.
However, this time I realised the loose floorboard was setting off more than my alarm clock. As I stepped on it the loud drilling type noise started up again. Only not quite so loud as it had been when I was sleeping with my ear next to it. Loud though. In the way that only a vibrator switching itself on against a wooden drawer base could be.
Oops!
*He's fine!
** A teenage boy living upstairs means I keep in a constant supply of ear plugs
Why? Because she has a prosthetic arm and allegedly did not fit with Abercrombie and Fitch's strict "looks policy"
See CharonQC
and
Usefully Employed
As anyone who follows me on twitter will be aware, I've been having a fucking nightmarepolite struggle with BT this week. Well, actually it's been going on for months but after I finally decided I'd have to face the stress it's started up again this week.
The problems started back in January when I moved into the flat. The phone line had been disconnected a few tenants back and so what should've been a simple process of getting a phone and broadband package set up became a mess. Initially I applied to talktalk as although they'd not been great for customer service, for approximately £20 a month for line rental, free calls to any landline and to multiple different countries so long as it was less than an hour per call, plus broadband...well, customer service is not the highest priority when the package is that good value. Unfortunately my landlord has never registered this property is flats rather than a house so TalkTalk were unable to tell which line was which and therefore unable to sort out activating the line. They advised me to speak to BT to sort out the line activation and then get back to TalkTalk to sort the package I wanted.
So, that's what I did. Except BT insisted they charged to activate the line. A charge of something like £70. Non refundable. I knew the BT sales team were talking rubbish, but after several weeks without internet access I was getting desperate. I was having to try and find places offering free wi-fi, which in itself is a problem in small town land. That's before you add in chaos of moving and trying to deal with all this with a disability that means it takes approximately 4 or 5 times the amount of time it takes other people to do things...if I can do them at all. So trailing round looking for wi-fi carrying a heavy laptop was leaving me spoon-less at a time I needed as many spoons as possible.
I tried a couple of times to sort out the line activation without a whopping charge, but in the end I was too tired and too stressed to deal with it so decided I'd have to do what BT advised, which was go with their phone/broadband package and avoid the line reactivation charges that way. As I say, I knew full well BT's sales team were trying it on, but I wasn't in a position to do anything about it. I was very, very foolishly reassured that the reason BT were charging double the price of my previous package and offering less for that price was because they provided outstanding customer service.
So, I signed up for BT's phone and broadband package, the most expensive one which includes the home hub and had no download limits etc at about £40 a month. Within a few days my first home hub arrived. Home hub was all shiny, black and pretty looking but like many pretty things, all it did was look pretty. It certainly didn't work. No matter how many times it was reinstalled, or how expert the IT skills of the person installing it, it simply wouldn't work. My laptop could pick up half a dozen other home hubs in the immediate area, but although it could see mine, it certainly couldn't access the internet with it. So, desperate for internet access I simply stuck an ethernet cable in and accessed the internet that way.
Whilst that solved the immediate problem of lack of access, it obviously didn't solve the non-working home hub problem. Eventually when I was a little more settled in the flat and could deal with the hours on the phone I knew it would take I phoned BT to try and sort it out.
The sales team couldn't deal with it of course, it had to go to technical support. BT's technical support is an offshore call centre, and to be generous the standard of spoken English varies wildly, as do the thickness of the accent's which can make the most grammatically correct English incomprehensible. Trying to explain to an overseas call centre operative exactly why you want to speak to someone based in the UK is difficult enough with a language barrier, and that's before refusal to deviate from the script comes in, or accusations of racism.
So, I spoke to the overseas tech support team. Multiple times. Every time I got to speak to someone either the connection would mysteriously disappear, or the operative would refuse to put me through to a manager. Asking to speak to someone in the UK felt like declaring oneself to be an active member of the BNP.
When I did get to speak to someone in tech support they'd insist on running through the same checklist over and over again. That someone in tech support had previously run through the exact same checklist did not count. There was one day I spent over three hours on the phone to the tech support team and ended up literally begging to be put through to the UK. A request which was repeatedly refused, lost or conveniently solved by hanging up on me. I don't consider myself a particularly highly strung person but by the end of all this I was a nervous wreck.
Eventually after multiple times running through the checklist I managed to get an overseas manager to agree to send me out a new home hub as mine was faulty. This they duly did and of course charged me a whopping £80 for the pleasure. As BT's billing and paperwork is so appallingly confusing I have no idea whether that money has been refunded. Tech support and complaints claim they cannot deal with that issue because it's a billing issue.
So, my second home hub arrived and I hoped that would be the end of that. I'd still be stuck in an extortionately overpriced contract, but at least all the services I was paying for would work. Stupid, foolish thought! The second home hub didn't work any better than the first. In fact it had the exact same fault the first one did. The computer could find the home hub but it couldn't connect to it, no matter what settings where changed.
The overseas tech team were very upset I refused to allow them remote access to my computer, but grudgingly agreed to run through the checklist without remote access. Unsurprisingly there wasn't a fault with any of the settings, but no matter what they tinkered with the home hub didn't work without a cable. They still refused to put me through to a UK based tech team.
After that I decided the stress simply wasn't worth it. I got one of my techy friends to set up my old Belkin router which worked fine wirelessly. Although there was still a problem with the connection dropping out at busy times, it was fine to view web pages but if you want to stream on something like iplayer the connection isn't sufficient to get through even a 10 minute video without flickering in and out.
Earlier this week someone phoned from BT to set up the BT vision I am apparently paying for as part of the package. I am completely unable to tell from the bills BT send what I'm paying for as it all comes separately. I do know the direct debits I set up aren't working properly as BT took £70+ from my bank account recently to pay for the next three months line rental. I decided that stress or no stress I was being completely ripped off for a service that doesn't work properly and that I'd have to do something about it.
So I called BT and explained briefly that there was a problem with the second home hub and the connection. The first person I spoke to insisted on transferring me to the overseas tech team, and when I asked to speak to his manager for the second time he simply hung up on me! I called back and spoke to someone else who did their best to be helpful and did actually manage after about 40 minutes of negotiating to book the UK based tech team to call back within 24 hours. They didn't but it wasn't far off that. Fortunately after waiting in for 24 hours I was still at home to receive the call.
A very lovely and helpful lady called Lyn spoke to me. Unfortunately despite the tech team having run through the checklist countless previous times she had to do so again. Which is where we hit several stumbling blocks as my home hub isn't even plugged in. There's not much point as it doesn't work! Then we needed to test the line, which requires the front of the socket to be unscrewed and the cable put directly into a test socket. Fair enough, except being disabled I'm not really in a position to unscrew sockets. Lyn wanted to know whether I could arrange for someone to come and assist me with that, which, if BT had been able to provide me with an accurate time for the tech team to phone back could probably have been arranged. Problem is they can't provide any time and I can't get someone to come hang out in my flat for 24 hours hoping BT will call back.
The situation is now that I still have a home hub that doesn't work. I still don't know if the £80 I was charged for it, despite it being under warrantee has been refunded. I can't use any of the associated services I'm being charged twice the price every other company charges.
To be fair, Lyn did her best to help. She phoned the special needs team at BT after I pointed that sending an engineer out to a disabled person should be seen as a reasonable adjustment under the Disability Discrimination Act and not be charged for regardless of whose fault the fault is! The special needs team had no advice to offer except to send out a form to register me as a special needs customer. To do that it has to somehow go through the local authority. The same local authority who stopped providing care to people because it's too expensive. Lyn will be phoning me back either on saturday or sunday once I've received the form.
After all this the only thing I care about is how not to receive these services from BT. The special needs customer thing is utterly irrelevant to the problems I'm having. I don't see why I should have to pay to get out of a contract when BT haven't met their contractual obligations. I no longer want a 3rd home hub, I just want a reliable internet connection and phone line which I could have for less than half the price BT charge. Overall my experience of BT is that they are the most overpriced rip off on the market, which, considering the original sales pitch explaining prices are higher in return for excellent customer service, is frankly a steaming load of bull!
Update June 26th 2009:
"Just emailed Ian Livingston head of BT about all this http://tinyurl.com/l5rukv Will he reply? #BTbroadbandisshitabout 23 hours ago from web"
Within an hour of my posting this tweet yesterday announcing I'd emailed Ian Livingston about these issues a very nice lady called Kate was on the phone trying to sort out all these issues. She was very down to earth and pragmatic as us Northern girls tend to be and managed to cut through all the bureaucratic nonsense which was the main feature of this problem. The socket does not need to be unscrewed as there is nothing wrong with the line and she has ordered me a new home hub which should arrive today. She also went through all the billing issues with me, made sure the previous charges for the second home hub hadn't been added to a bill and sorted out the £73 which had been debited in advance for my broadband rental by making sure the monthly direct debits were working properly.
Hopefully the home hub will arrive today, and, bendy fingers crossed it will also work as a wireless router, I'll let you all know!
My advice to BT is this: if you got Kate to train all your front line staff and as an organisation took her no nonsense approach to getting things done you'd improve BT's customer service profile overnight!
Only a bendy person would have their arms/hands in such a strange position as part of normal movement!
