More fun with BT

So, I had a Featureline service with 3 lines. Nothing wrong with it, nice
handsets. When I took the service in 07 business sales and support were
handled by a 3rd party company in Leeds and everything was fine.

Now, of course, the service is handled in India/Wales and is utterly
attrocious. 30 minute waits. Nobody can ever help. Pass the parcel.

So after considerable trouble I managed to pass an instruction to cancel the
Featureline services, downgrading to individual PSTN which I can then churn
to a different provider.

Last night something changed, once again I had to dial 9 for a line. This
morning a Welcome Pack arrived from BT.
"Welcome to your new FEATURE LINE SERVICE"

Fortunately I had some soft toys to hand to lob at the walls. It then took
5 phone calls just to get to someone who had any fucking idea. One of the
fob offs was to a Special NHS Helpline who could assist me. It was a
fucking fax machine.

Mark Cornell at BT was ever an ineffectual **** but today I'd like to lower
him, slowly, heels first, into an industrial meat grinding machine.

<and breathe>

 

Sky get me in that lather....

 

Conversely, I'm setting up an N3 connection for a client at the moment
and despite my initial palpitations when I saw my name, NHS and BT on
the same email, BT have been remarkably helpful and responsive. Trebles
all round!

 

I expect for very large clients it is still ok.
Our support for Bytel was ok, acting for Citigroup in NI was same and in DX
days with a 150 node Frame Relay network they were spotty dog.

As an SME I suggest another provider.

N3, now there is a process to reckon with )

 

They were with us during setup - it's when things go wrong down the
road that you find out how utterly useless they are.

 

I was tickled to see most of the Qs on the N3 FAQ were "why have you
blocked gambling sites", "which sites have been blocked", "how can I get
a site unblocked" and "will you be reporting people who try to access
blocked sites".

People work hard in the NHS, eh?

 

I suppose because the accents are pretty much interchangeable.

 

<Bear baiting mode>
Well, once we move to the Govmint being a Univeral Insurer and all regional
and local healthcare being privately provisioned it won't matter.

 

Clueless cunts all

 

BT managed to break our PSTN line this week too, completely dead at the
exchange. I didn't even need to speak to a human, all diagnosed and
reported online. I hasten to add on our backup broadband connection from
another provider.

Surprisingly they managed to fix it within a couple of hours too. Just
as I'd finished plugging our rather wonderful Trixbox/Asterisk PBX [1]
into the backup broadband. Quite impressed with the Gradwell VoIP
offering, only difficulty I had was wondering why it didn't work until I
realised I had to do some slight tweaking of the PBX settings to match
the backup broadband IP address.

[1] Only because I created it for much cheapness out of some old
discarded Cisco kit which meant BT didn't manage to sell us their
overpriced and feature poor kit.

 

You almost make it sound like you do a proper job. WTF are you doing on UKRM

 

Did you do a nice sales monkey "hold in hell" script to go with it?

 

heh. I avoid that issue by not having a TV.

Can't say i've missed it much ..

Paul.

 

I find that I post more to ukrm when bikeless, helps keep me sane. Or
maybe it makes me feel relatively sane when compared to most of the
regulars on here ;-)

I've been pretty lucky most of my working life in finding paid work that
has been both interesting and fun to me. Although I have noticed
recently that it's been getting harder to keep the ratio of boring stuff
down to a reasonable level.

 

I prefer to forward those kind of calls to the person in our own company
who has been most irritating that week.

 

Better yet - like the Swiss, make private health cover mandatory for
everyone, but keep a strict control over how they're allowed to work.

Ins Cos are much better at Insurance than a govt. dept could ever be.

 

Forming a nationalised non-profit manufacturing company to make medical
equipment would help matters. Not so much high-tech electronic stuff
but things like beds & stretchers. They're so stupidly spastically
obscenely over priced you could probably knock 90% off the NHS
purchasing budget.

 

That is only because the NHS doesn't know how to do supplies and
procurement.
UKAEA was exactly the same.

Do you think these things can't be sourced from China at sensible costs or
that hospitals in the Philippines pay that sort of money?

The whole concept of the NHS is completely bankrupt. NHS should *mean*
taxation/state funded personal healthcare insurance policies. Effectively
American healthcare without the insurance industry. Funded by companies and
individuals through NI payments. With NI as a separate tax fund, like wot
VED should be. With local private healthcare providors competing for
services. But with delivery, costs and quality managed at a central level by
said NHS.

You can disagree as much as you like but develop a serious condition, a
cancer for instance, and if you can afford it you will go to the US for
treatment, not the UK.

 

With detailed five-year production targets for make benefit glorious
nation!

 

But if you _can't_ afford it...

And, let's be honest, it's not just <say> the bottom 5% who can't afford
above-NHS cancer treatment in the US.

It's probably only the top 10-20% who _can_. The rest will quickly hit
the caps on their health insurance. If they've got any.

The whole idea of the NHS isn't to provide best-possible healthcare, but
to provide a good solid level of healthcare. Which, on the whole, it does
very well. If you want best-possible, and are happy to pay for it,
there's already a private healthcare industry here who'll be happy to
give you that top-up. For a price.

Meanwhile, nobody dies like a dog in the gutter. Here.