Waiting for Bulldog

“Thank you for calling Bulldog Broadband. Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered as soon as one of our representatives is available. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, your call will be answered shortly. Once again, sorry about the delay.”

My internet connection has been non-functional since Thursday night; It just packed in around 8 p.m. and has not worked since. I would love to report the problem to Bulldog (my internet service provider) but I have no means of contacting them other than an email address which they never respond to or a phone line which they rarely answer.

Whenever I try to ring their technical support line, the calming voice of Bulldog apologies and then tells me that they are too busy to answer any technical support requests right now; They suggest that I try their web-site or call back later.

If this were some kind of performance art installation, or perhaps a figment from a Kafkaesque nightmare I could see the irony, however I am trying get my connection fixed a quarter of an hour before they close for the weekend. What hope do I have?

Actually, I lied about the email address; They do answer it sometimes - first you get a well worded (but automatic) response informing you that your query will be dealt with efficiently and with the greatest possible haste. This is another lie. My technical support query will be answered by a dribbling imbecile.

He or she will be barely literate, possessing neither the ability to comprehend nor to write simple English expressions. Only an insane optimist would expect the slightest technical acumen from the person who tries to answer my mail.
This illiterate will randomly push buttons on the computer they barely know how to operate, and if I am lucky, I will receive a barely coherent response to somebody else’s question in less than a decade. Having failed to make any sense from email support, my next attempt was to try the phone line…

This phone service is a trial by ordeal; I must brave the triple evils of call-queuing, incompetence and impatience. Having sat through a bastardised concoction of “The Four Seasons” and Mozart, I was lucky enough to get through to customer service; This is no mean feat, as my half-hour long queue forced me to listen to the same 30 second pop-classic loop for many more times than is good for my sanity;

This is of course another deliberate trick. Operators of call-centres know that they can break the resolve of callers by making the wait as annoying as possible. A caller who hangs up before logging a fault is a customer who does not have to be dealt with.

Do not imagine that the person you eventually reach will have the power to assist you, think of this as a greater and harder challenge than your futile attempts to get email support. The customer servant I got through to to had recently been plucked off the street and knew nothing at all of the complexities of ATM and TCP/IP. Likely as not, he supposed the Internet to work by magic; and hence his diagnostic routines are not driven by any technological understanding but rather a sort of ritual or personal delusion.

His or her goal is to get me off the line at all costs; In an understaffed call centre, employees are penalised for lingering on the phone for long enough to do any good. The ‘servant’ will do anything to avoid having to log a fault; According to the arcane system of call-centre accounting, the act of acknowledging that a fault may exist is the worst kind of failure - it will cost his company to fix the fault, and the rep will not be rewarded for caring.

Rather than acknowledge a fault they must rid themselves of my pesky call. They have perfected their strategies for getting rid of customers; for example when I report that my line is faulty, he first suggests that I try a different ‘micro-filter’, a component so simple that it hardly ever fails. He knows of course that most customers do not have spare micro filters.

When I call back (another 1 hour wait), the next rep tells me that it is probably a DNS fault; He suggests changing the DNS settings on my router. Yet another absurd notion… a suggestion that has no relevance to the observed symptoms; I tell him so. Next he suggests that it might be a faulty modem… that normally forces customers out to PC world before they ring back.

Luckily I have a spare modem and I quickly swap them over, revealing that the spare is just as unable to connect as my usual device. After another half-hour of holding the customer service rep tells me that the test is meaningless unless it is carried out from the master socket; They wont be able to log a fault unless I re-run the test from the master socket and they refuse to hold while I perform this simple test. It would have saved hours of holding if the first rep had mentioned this; but that is hardly the objective of Tech Support.

It’s getting late now; the call-centre closes in fifteen minutes and I still have no internet connection. The service reps have refused to log a fault, and they do not work on weekends. Their fault-finding advice has just been a big waste of time and I have no more of an internet connection than I did when it failed last night.
With the butchered “Four Seasons” ringing in my poor ears I am at my wits end.

If only I could fix this matter by changing service providers; The irony of course is that what I have experienced is normal in the world of customer service; I could switch to BT, Demon or any of the other big providers, but I know they would be approximately as bad; And bulldog know it to which is why there is almost no incentive at all for them to up their game.