Mutter young 'un's

[RedThorn]

Now I apologise first and foremost to those who are on here who this is aimed at but honestly!


My tinternet's been up the creek for the last week and the blooming youngsters in the call centres think everyone on the other end of the phone line is a blooming idiot( shuddup G4)

Sorry sir I think it's your laptop he says, then he blames my Chrome (because it ain't ie) then he blames my operating system being a lowly XP then he tries my wireless NIC.

At each stage I puppy walk him through the steps

and try and get through to him that it's multiple devices using multiple Operating systems that the problem exists on and use sonny it is the same wired or wireless

3 laptops, 2 android phones(all on different version OS's) cannot all have suffered the exact same problem simultaneously as the odds are mind boggling... then I get but sir, perhaps then it's your antivirus software then sir....(include big sigh and major roll of eyes) but sonny, across the 5 devices I'm running 3 different anti virus softwares and if you include the VM's, then I have 13 devices across 7 OS platforms then now we are getting silly with the odds being that the problem is on my side....insert pregnant pause.... finally he concedes defeat.... I'm gonna escalate this... thank you!(over an hour later on the phone to him alone at this point)

They get a field agent to test line... oh my goodness guess what!? they found a fault..... now I wait with bated breath to see if it gets fixed

For those of you who remember cradles.... this connection doth be slower than that. My good ol' 14.4k modem knocked the socks off this connection....

[donnakebab]

The only bit of that I understood was the bit where they found a fault.

I'm not young though.

[Nicos]

Ha! we had EXACTLY the same problem with SFR ( French equivalent of 'talk talk' )when we first moved here. Took a year to sort out!

Know what the problem was ? ...an Oxidized connection box where the line hits the house.
We had to threaten to sue them to finally get it investigated properly.

and guess what? It's fairly common problem in boxes of about 30 yrs of age exposed to the elements!

[RedThorn]

A year!? PLEASE NOOOoooooooo..........!

[Nicos]

You should be so lucky!!!!

[chris]

Yep, frustrating isn't it? Unfortunately I have to deal with muppets that like daily in my new job, albeit slightly different.

They have a script in front of them, that the big wigs feel solves 99% of the cases

[Florence Fennel]

Oh dear RT, hope you get it sorted soon. I'm afraid I ask the young men in our IT Department to consider me an idiot when they are explaining things to me. They're very patient and have taught me loads of techy stuff that I never thought I'd be able to do.

[dominic10]

My tech knowledge was state of the art round about 1997 - what's an android phone I ask myself, does it walk towards you when it rings? But from previous experience of problems testing the line was always one of the first things done it's too easy to blame xyz nowadays. I think it is just a way of fobbing people off. Probably on the script testing the line is right at the bottom.

[RedThorn]

It's a pity they don't always actually understand the script in front of them...

[cardiffsteve]

Did you try switching it off and on again?

[chris]

You should see the scripts here. They're written in "sales speak".

They have things in it like:

"... understand, yeah?"

"init"

Poor grammar, hardly any properly constructed sentences etc. Yet they still rake in the money

[Snadger]

Did you try switching it off and on again?

I remember that......the old Microsoft panacea for all problems!

[RedThorn]

Kamikaze reset Snadger that's what it's oft called and yes, I did to both the devices, and both wireless routers and ADSL modem.... sigh, still haven't fixed the line fault yet

[Rabidbun]

Line faults are a pain to get them to sort out. Had a crackle for best part of a year before now (BT swore all was fine) until the phone just went dead - the wire had just aged and cracked. That was fun to sort out!

Half the trouble with tech stuff though is that you do genuinely get folks that phone in not knowing where the power switch on the box that came with their computer is (they were turning it on and off at the wall I think and didn't know the screen wasn't the computer bit), and the instant you assume technical competancy it tends to bite you in the rear on calls!

There are good T shirts with that quote above on it btw!

[RedThorn]

I try not succumb to the ID ten T fault