Going into our second week without internet in the flat its tedious but in many respects it has also been equally a good thing for me.
Firstly a little background. About a month ago, Sky our broadband provider phoned us up on a sales call to basically get us to transfer our line rental from BT to Sky and save us some money, at the same time getting free broadband for 6 months. We thought, great free broadband for 6 months and one less bill to worry about. Roll round last Saturday a BT Openreach engineer turns up unannounced to perform the line switchover to sky, we initially thought nothing of it, a few hours without broadband wouldnt kill us. Just to make sure we phoned up sky to get the low down and were told that it was all normal and we should expect broadband back on within 24 hours (1st Lie).
Roll around Monday (48 hours) and still no broadband, another call to sky ensues, this time we are told they cant proceed as the BT line is a business line (2nd lie) and it would be up to 7-8 working days for broadband to be enabled. I phone up BT on the Tuesday (3 days) to confirm what i knew to be correct that our line in fact was a residential line and sky were lying to us. We recieve a call from a very nice manager at sky just after telling us they were still waiting for the new line to be shown as active from BT and that it could be up to 15 days before broadband is active, she was the first person to actually explain what was going on.
We called up again sky in the evening because it wasnt acceptable, after holding for what seemed like eternity and getting thrown between different teams and departments we finally found out what the actual issue was, that one of their sales staff incorrectly processed the order, in fact they were not even supposed to have offered us the upgrade in the first place. As a result our old broadband is still showing as cancelling on there systems (dont ask me why it takes so long to flick a switch and press a button). Now the mind totally boggles between how a simple migrate a line from BT (retaining the old number) turned into a serious lack of communication between teams and how such a grossly negligent mistake was made. The mind also boggles as to why they cant simply start the process of recreating our broadband connection on the new line (we cant keep our old number now) because the system will only allow one process to happen at the same time (and probably only unless you are adding packages like sports or HD). We are told it will be up to 30 days, friends have told us that they were out for 8 weeks when a similar mistake happened (gulp).
In hindsight if it had have been explained to us that we may have had to have gone without internet for a few days or that we couldnt keep our number, then we probably would have gone and said no to the sky salesman. To give Sky a little credit however, they have given us half price line rental for a year and are going to give us the free broadband offer we weren’t eligible for in the first place. its still tempting to try and bill them for accessing BT Openzone during this time as i somewhat rely on internet for a good chunk of my job, but i think that will be a lost cause.
Anyway back to my topic, its Grrr but its actually quite good in a way. This last week I have not been up all hours just mindlessly surfing the internet at all ungodly hours of the day, I have been going to bed at decent times and in some respects have been less reclusive. I really find this a positive as I am feeling more energised each morning (good for cycling but more later) and being less reclusive is always a benefit. perhaps I can find a little more time to post here as I notice i havent been about for a little while (will have to compose thoughts offline and upload when I do have internet). Its annoying not having internet because I cant watch tv on demand and catch up on missed shows, and a large part of my work means for example if a server goes down for whatever reason I need to be online and somehow looking at the problem – my mobile broadband dongle only has so much traffic it can take on the contract for free in a month, I am feeling somewhat relieved that all servers i rent or manage have just about hit there sweet spots in terms of running reliably and well that I havent yet had any issues (big touch wood here).
Last day as a 21 year old today and my GoCycle is good but more on that another day 🙂
Leave a Reply