Forty days in the wilderness

On Sunday, after over a month in the info-desert, Bell Canada finally deigned to connect my apartment to the Internet. In my judgment, that called for a celebratory bittorrent.

Forty days? Apparently that’s how long it takes to get Ma Bell to notice some ill communication. Over those forty days, I think I spent six hours on the phone: on hold, repeating my problem to useless frontline tech support people, desperately trying to get someone who would acknowledge the problem and send someone to the frickin’ apartment to fix it. Their system seems pretty hopeless: frontline support people had no records of past calls I’d made, or of tech staff’s communications with me. I was told repeatedly that I’d been “escalated” and would get a call from technical staff and the problem fixed “in 48 hours,” but never got a call, let alone a fix.

In the end, it was my building’s fault: they got lazy during renovation and hooked my apartment up wrong. But it didn’t need to take Bell 40 days to figure that out.

Stay far, far away.

3 Replies to “Forty days in the wilderness”

  1. Yeah…I can’t handle Bell but I kind of want to work for them to see if there is reason behind the frustration people experience when they need customer support. The system is so surprinsingly difficult that it makes you think it is like that on purpose.

  2. Nice musical reference.

    I just noticed your, um, attention to detail in calling it a URI in the comments field … has anyone submitted a non-URL URI yet? 🙂

  3. Uh, probably not. I didn’t put the URI reference in – it must be something that came with WordPress. I’m sure those guys are sufficiently pedantic to make the distinction… I don’t even know the difference between a URI and a URL, offhand.

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