Changing Broadband – Part Two
Posted: Thu 24 July, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky 1 Comment »According to an email I’ve just received, the broadband at home is now running on Tiscali rather than BT.
Of course, I’m working in Essex today, so won’t know if it’s actually worked until I get home tonight and get it all set up. All the same, fingers crossed that it’s all worked smoothly, so I don’t have to spend time tonight swearing at connections etc.
I’m vaguely optimistic – but at the same time, I’m fully expecting to get home and have no broadband at all. I’m cynical like that.
So we’ll just have to see what works, and whether everything’s set up or not. You may (or, of course, may not) hear more about this tonight, depending on ye olde connectivity.
Changing Broadband
Posted: Thu 17 July, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised Leave a comment »I’ve just started off the (hopefully fairly painless) process of switching broadband providers. As we’ve been in the house a year now, I knew that the contract with BT was up, so the time was right for changing.
With BT, the broadband was costing me £25 per month for unlimited downloads etc.
With Tiscali, the same deal will be costing me £15 per month.
I know people have said that Tiscali’s customer services aren’t great, but I don’t expect to be using that side of the service much. So we’ll see how things go.
The changeover should happen in about ten days time – so if I fall off the face of the world at the end of the month, you can be sure that the first post on my return will be one cursing Tiscali and the twelve month contract I’ve just entered into…
English Test
Posted: Thu 3 July, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts, Writing 6 Comments »The BBC has a 20-questions test on English (with Maths next week)
I got 20 out of 20. But then I’m
- Incredibly sad
- At least vaguely literate
How about you?
Mail Down
Posted: Wed 2 July, 2008 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Geeky 2 Comments »Currently, it’s looking like the mail server for 34sp.com is totally down. [UPDATED : The service was broken on my reseller server, rather than 34sp as a whole. It’s also now fixed.]
I can’t send or receive email at all when using their services/servers, and haven’t been able to since last night.
Calling their support line, it does amuse me that the musical hold I ended up with was the Muppets theme song. Somehow you’ve just got to love a company with that kind of humour.
BT’s Wonderful Anti-Spam Measures
Posted: Tue 1 July, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky 2 Comments »I got an email from BT this morning…
Urgent- BT is making some changes to its email service. Emails you send from alternate BT Yahoo! Mail addresses may be blocked. (Additional comment from me: It’s not just from alternate Yahoo! Mail addresses – it’s anything except your default BT Yahoo email name)
Dear Customer,
We’re upgrading the security of your BT Yahoo! Mail account to help prevent identity fraud and spam.
These enhancements will help protect you from ‘spoofing’ – when people use alternate addresses to disguise an email’s real sender, possibly to commit fraud.Making the improvements work
For the security improvements to work, we need you to take a few minutes now to verify each of the alternate email addresses you use in BT Yahoo! Mail. This will confirm that these email addresses are genuine. If you don’t verify your alternate BT Yahoo! Mail addresses, you may get an Error 553 message and have difficulty sending emails.Please verify addresses now to avoid blocking of your outgoing emails.
Simply follow the step-by-step instructions at www.btyahoo.com/verify. You won’t be asked for any personal information, but you’ll need to log in to your account to make the changes.
We’re committed to helping you get the most from your award-winning BT Yahoo! Mail. The changes we’ve made will help reduce spam on the network and improve your enjoyment of the service. We hope this doesn’t cause any inconvenience and appreciate your co-operation.
Kind regards,
BT Total Broadband team
Please note that this is an automatically generated email for your information only. Unfortunately we cannot respond to ‘replies’ to this address.
Of course, this would have been much more useful if they’d sent it back in March, when they actually did the work, and fucked up my email so badly I had to set up my own SMTP server instead. As it stands, we’re two-plus months down the line, and all this does is make BT look like the bunch of contemptuous customer-hostile fuckwit bastards they truly are.
Even better, I can’t even reply to that email and tell them what tossers they are.
Customer Service as it should never ever be done…
What’s Your Story?
Posted: Fri 20 June, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Writing Leave a comment »Yesterday, following on from links by Tom and Laura, I entered into Waterstone’s “What’s Your Story?” competition.
The rules are simple – a story that’ll fit on a postcard, with a maximum of 600 characters. Due to the time-crunch in getting it done, (Yesterday was the last day for entries) I wrote the entire thing online, as I didn’t have time to print it, do it, scan it, send it, etc. However, that actually helped in a lot of ways, made it far easier to just get on with it.
When all’s said and done, 600 characters isn’t that much anyway. Although it’s an interesting (and, from the looks of it, popular) challenge to get an entire story into that number of characters.
I’ve no idea whether it’ll get any further, but for something approaching ten minute’s work, I’m not displeased with it at all.
Text after the link… Read the rest of this entry »