Open Letter to a Bunch of Mooks

[thessalian]

Dear telecoms companies of London:

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME.

See, there's this flat. It is a nice little flat. People have lived in it. Therefore, it's had the phone connected. Therefore, it should be a relatively simple feat to connect it to the existing phone lines. It always has been previously. This has never been an issue.

Your websites, however, tell me a different story. All of them seem to be of the opinion that six weeks is perfectly reasonable a time for a residence to be without a land line or internet. In this day and age ... how about no? No, it is not reasonable to take nearly two months to connect a flat to the outside world. I'm sorry, but it just isn't. At all. In the least. But you all seem to be of this belief. I blew an hour on comparison shopping - not so much for money as for "Which of you wankstains can get my damn phone connected first?" - only to find that each and every one of you have decided that 10th January is the absolute earliest that you can get a phone connected to a residence. So I basically had to pick one and hope.

It's too late to ring you up and bawl you out about it now. Besides, I have packing to do. However. Tomorrow, in between the running around to go pick up my keys and then come back to help load my shit into the back of a van and then go back to this flat to which you refuse to hook a phone line until the next fucking ice age, I will be giving you a quick bell to ask you, in slightly more polite terms than this, what the hell kind of bullshit are you actually playing at here?

I imagine that what's going to happen is that I am going to ring you up, give you my best 'stern pissed-off professional person' voice for awhile, and someone will tell me that your website is for suckers and that I can get this bumped up. I am not living for six weeks in a flat without a land line phone or internet. I can get by for a week or so with net cafes, but six weeks is fucking ridiculous.

Now, I have to go and forage for food. Then I have to go throw stuff into boxes. I will be fuming all the while, FYI.

Regards,

One really pissed-off Canadian ex-pat.

Comments

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

I believe my icon says it all.

[doccy.livejournal.com]

The problem with comparison shopping for phone lines is that BT still owns/runs the underlying infrastructure - so when it comes to connection times, it's like choosing between the different flavours of shit that they do not give.

(But that said, yes, absolutely, chase them like mad - it does sometimes work)

[kelemvor.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I'm fairly sure that it didn't take that long for our phone to be connected...

Also, what doccy says about BT. They once accidentally cancelled one production site's backup ISDN line because they'd had a call from a different business with a similarly-named contact to cancel a line, and it took them four weeks to flip the switch the other way!