As it turns out, the tag on my line – my new, unused line – was with Tiscali. They had a record of my new number having a tag on it. To this day I don’t understand how that was possible, but perhaps you’ve shed some light on it.

In the end I gave up trying to get information out of BT. Eventually they managed to sort out my broadband and the service has been good since, but they offered me 30 quid recompense for the troubles I’d had and that was it. I really really really tried telling them that it was such an oddddd situation it needed looking into but the person at the other end seemed either not to understand, or not to care.

I recently heard about someone with similar woes on the radio. In the end they too had to go to Ofcom. But at the end of the day, you really just want your broadband now – not in three months plus…

This time last year I attempted to switch my broadband from Talk Talk to BT because my connection kept dropping and the only advice I could get from Talk Talk was to plug a microfilter into a microfilter as my Sky connection was causing the problem…..

I won’t bore you too much with my hopelesly convoluted story of BTs ineptitude, but suffice to say they managed to activate a transfer of a neighbour’s TalkTalk line instead of mine. The result – the neighbour’s business line was disconnected, he lost all incoming calls, email and broadband (and substantial income) and the only way for him to resolve it was to become a BT customer, start again with a new telephone number (and reprint stationery etc for his business) and then activate a transfer back to Talk Talk. Then BT billed him for ending his contract early….

Meanwhile I’m still a Talk Talk customer, still have constant loss of broadband connection, and spend half my life speaking to call centre staff who keep telling me the connection problem is at my end – it’s the Sky connection, the microfilter needs changing, I need two microfilters, I need a double microfilter, I need a new router etc etc. I unplugged Sky, got new microfilters, a new router, tried everything they suggested, spent days on end to call centre staff, being passed from one department to another and enduring the dispiriting experience of repeating personal details, bank details, mother’s maiden name, inside leg measurement, DNA information etc and then having to repeat the whole sorry tale of cock-ups, mix-ups and f*ck-ups that was now entering it’s third month. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent listening to their bloody signature tune – the ironincally titled ‘Now We’ve Got to Get it Together’ (oh how I wish they would…). Eventually I resorted to downloading it from iTunes and playing it back to them at full volume when I finally got through (after anything up to 45minutes of holding). They got their revenge by switching to Roger McGough reciting poetry to entertain me in the hours I spent on hold.

Eventually I lost the will to live, exploded in a rage-filled rant at some hapless individual in India who immediately transferred me to a UK call centre to someone who FINALLY suggested an engineer come out to check the line. The result? He discovered 278 faults and a connection to the exchange that consisted of little more than rubber bands and bits of string. Four hours later I was re-wired, re-routed, upgraded and re-connected. I haven’t had a problem with the broadband connection since, but am out of pocket to the tune of sixty quid for a router, hours of my life spend listening to Roger McGough AND a final demand from BT for £170. For a service I’ve never had… And to top it all off, I can’t claim any compensation because I’m ‘not a customer’ (a fact BT confidently assert, despite billing me repeatedly). Tho at least my loss is nothing compared to my neighbour, who is still in legal wrangles with BT a year later (and who also isn’t entitled to compensation, because he wasn’t a BT customer when it happened!!!).

Broadband suppliers have us all over a barrel – call centre staff really don’t care whether we cancel our service with them or not, and our hands are tied when we try to carry out our disconnection threats as it simply leads us back to the kind of nightmare Brendan is now experiencing – no one takes any ownership or tries to to solve the problem from the inside, leaving us being passed from pillar to post until we’re fit to scream/cry/kill ourselves/kill them.

Perhaps this is the way forward – out them online through tactical blog-shaming. If nothing else it might stop new customers signing up with them and trying publicly recommended alternatives instead of the couldn’t-give-a-toss big-boys with huge marketing budgets and no after-sales service.

I would happily change to Zen Broadband but daren’t even attempt to switch providers again – I don’t think I’d survive if I had to live through something like that again.

My advice is to demand an engineer to check your connection at the exchange. It seems to be the only way to find out where the fault really lies, but the broadband providers don’t like having to pay OpenReach £140 for a visit (yet will happily fund literally hundreds of hours of customer support to one individual accountholder – it’s insane).

This is what I just sent to the very nice helpful person at BT who gave me her email address so that I didn’t have to spend another half hour repeating my details and problem before I got to someone who might be able to help:

As you suggested, I just spoke to Virgin Media.

Please advise as to my options here and, if necessary, escalate.

Comments?

I moved into my new flat with Jim and we called BT to get a phoneline installed for using Sky in both of our bedrooms and the internet.

The problem was that upon moving in, we weren’t sure whether out flat was classified ‘First Floor Flat’ or ‘Flat 3′ (as it was the third flat going upwards in the block) and either landlord didn’t even know. So we ended up hedging our bets and told BT it was First Floor Flat.

So they came over and connected us up. It worked for about 3 or 4 months but then, even after receiving a letter stating the date by which we had to pay our first bill, we were cut off suddenly, 2 weeks before our anticipated ‘pay-by’ date.

So Jim calls them up to enquite in why we had been cut off and whether they can kindly, reconnect us. We paid the bill on my card (they don’t apologise) but said that they can quite happily reconnect us for a charge of £30 but it would have to be on a new number and we would have to book for an engineer to come over again and switch the routing to a pole on the street with a spare line slot. Er, why should we have to pay an £30 connection fee when it was their fault that they cut us off prematurely??

So after much deliberation and lots of phone calls to wrongly directed numbers by the customer service staff (which probably totalled about 3 or 4 hours calling time on our mobile’s), they agreed to send somebody round to re-install a new line without a charge of £30.

It took about 2 weeks for them to arrive and I had to take a day off work – but they installed a new ‘temporary’ line and gave us a new number for me to pass onto Virgin Active to set-up our Sky service and I was told that it would simply take 10 days for the connection to go through.

Surprise, surprise – after 10 days, the new line wasn’t working so we called Virgin to ask why. They then told us that they had connected us but the number BT gave them was inactive. So again, we called BT and waited on the line for maybe an hour to enquire. Once we got through, they then apologised that the engineer had given us the wrong number and gave us a new number as apparently they re-connected to Flat 3 even though we told them we were ‘First Floor Flat!!! Urrrggggggghhhhh!!!!!!

So…..we then called Virgin Active and gave them the new number to connect us to Sky. We waited for another 10 days…..still no connection. They then told me that our local BT building had a powercut and we needed to wait for a further 5 days. Eventually we were connected and both our Sky TV and Broadband worked. But this is after months of brain-racking and it actually affected our work as I was working many extra hours at the time from home and so was my flatmate and we didn’t have the internet.

THEN…my flatmate Jim gets a bill through the door 2 weeks later saying we owed them £60 ON TOP of our regular line charges even though we hadn’t been using the line due to their incompetant service and extremely poor customer support.

Eventually we moved but always refused to pay the £60 bill and they haven’t bothered chasing us about it

Did this happen? No, it didn’t. I picked up the phone, asked for broadband, and was told that there was an open order to have my telephone number changed!

At this point my head nearly popped.

I said this was most definitely not the case – I’d had it changed, but did not want it to change again – and said that if BT did not move on this immediately I would have to take legal action.

This seemed to have the desired effect. I was put on hold for about half an hour, but eventually it turned out that this could even have predated my moving. Evidently something had gone very wrong with my details and finally, so they said, they’d cleared it all out.

In theory I should be able to get broadband kicked off later today. I should be able to pick up the phone and order it, with no problems.

I have been here three times before – twice with VM, and once with BT. So I remain to be convinced.

Regarding ‘The Test’, well in fairness Alex did offer help, and actually peewii (http://www.i-am-what-i-am-diaries.blogspot.com/) ‘found’ me and tweeted offering help, both of them from Virgin Media. Problem is that VM had already burned their bridges – I was a month and a half down the line before anyone bothered to check for me whether in fact I could have got a service off them in the first place.

So VM seem to have at least two people clued up enough to be on the lookout for mentions of their own company online. Good for them. Nothing from BT as yet though…

And thanks for all the supportive comments. As you can imagine, for someone like me who really needs online access as part of their work, it’s actually been pretty stressful (on top of moving house too). And as Sally says above, what would have happened if I were some little old lady (not that I’m implying her mum is little or old but you know you what I mean) who really did not understand these things, who took people at their word, believing them actually to know what they’re talking about?

Because they don’t, you know. Each department seems to be partitioned from the other. No one seems able to get the full picture. This not only means a disconnect but in some cases directly contradictory messages. The onus is on the prospective customer to do all the hard work, and on very few occasions did I get the feeling the person at the other end of the line was actually offering value, offering me solutions rather than problems.

I mean, how would you feel if you heard the following:”It’s a ‘never’ account.”; “It’s an LLU tag.”; “There’s an open stop order on the PSTN.” In all cases I had to stop the person at the other end of the line and patiently ask them to explain what on earth they were talking about and, when they told me, ask why on earth they’d told me that and how on earth did it help me?

OK. Let’s be calm again. In theory, I should be able to go through the system like a dose of salts later today. More anon, hopefully not ‘and on…’