Well BT have made a fine mess of things here.  As predicted, I received a call at 11am from the engineer who was coming out between 8 and 12 to say that he was at the wrong address.  Turns out that this is where our mail has been going too!  You’d think that given that they’d got this wrong last time, they might have updated their records.  You’d think wrongly.

So, as predicted, he’s been sent to a job at 14 High Street and couldn’t come a few metres down the road to 14 Berkeley Mews, High Street.  I said “Please can you just come and talk to me?” So he did.  I got the usual spiel about him working for Openreach and not BT - yet another measure put in place to ensure that BT cannot deal with problems.  He was a good bloke though and ended up arguing with his boss on our behalf, saying that he could in fact fit the line, he just needed authorisation.  He even said it was a “right bl**dy c*ck up”, which was just about right.
After 1.5 hours of faffing, we had a new line.  He has told us that they insist we are 29 the High Street, so we are not to expect any mail.  Great, it starts all over again.

I called 02 to ask if they would re-instate our broadband.  Now 02 are actually very helpful with their BB customer service.  They told me that BT had not just removed the BT broadband package that we didn’t order, but also removed the capability for the line to have broadband on it.  So 02 have had to (at their expense) send an engineer to the exchange to rectify this, meaning we have been offline for a further 6-10 working days.  Excellent.

In the meantime, we have a compensation claim going through at £250 per day.  Will we get it?  Yeah right.  Still, here is the email, documented.  Note the bit that says that Pam does not have the authority to issue “ANY” compensation.  This will be the case I fear.
Dear Mark

I was sorry to hear of your BT experience regarding the ceasing of your line and broadband.   As a design company I fully empathise with the situation where your broadband is critical  and the amount of business that must have  been lost during this unnecessary process.

I have raised an issue with our Complaints/Service Team Ref: 16897 today and put a case forward for relevant compensation.  I do not have the authority to allocate any compensation nor any value of that from this office but this issue will be picked up by one of the complaints team who will contact you shortly to bring this to a satisfactory resolve.

In the meantime, I would like to apologise on behalf of BT for the inconvenience caused.

With regards

Pam

Pamela Cox
Service Manager

BT Local Business
represented by  Leading Edge Group (UK) Ltd

You may or may not know that the Turners are on the move again.  Our landlady is selling our house and so yet again, I find myself packing boxes, for the 5th time in 4 years.  We had a right faff on Friday, we’d found a place to move to and wrote our one month’s notice letter.  However, when I spoke to the letting agent they said that once we had gone past the 12 month contract, we were automatically put on a periodic contract and that somehow this meant that we had to give notice from the date that we moved in (in our case 20th of the month).

This didn’t make sense to me.  We changed the day our rent goes out to 1st and paid the difference.  Did this mean we had to give notice on 20th and then pay the difference again? Or do we give notice on 20th and actually end up giving two months of notice when we can only hold a new place for up to one month?  The whole thing was ridiculous and I told them so very politely.  I asked if it was a legal requirement and they said they didn’t know.  I also said that since we were no longer bound by the 12 month contract that we signed, how could it stand?  I was told that I had signed a 12 month contract that clearly stated that we would be put on to this periodic agreement.

Unfortunately for the agent, we check contracts meticulously before we sign them. We usually end up having to ask them to remove or amend various bits which have simply been worded carelessly but that could, if we signed it, leave us in a predicament.  For example, one contract we didn’t sign, stated that we may have cats, but that the landlord may, at any time and without any given reason, change their mind about this.  We asked what we would be required to do with our cats if the landlord woke up on a whim one day and decided he didn’t like them anymore.  We asked them to change it to state that they must have  a (pretty good) reason.  Anyway, we had done a similar thing with Errington Smith.  There was some clause that was worded badly that we asked to have removed.  Sadly, they removed the notice period as well!  Ooops.

We wrote to the landlady and said that legally (we checked), we were not required to give any notice at all, but that in the spirit of good tenancy, we would like to give one month.  As it happened, she was very grateful because the agent’s story was very different!!  When she rang them to ask why on earth there was no notice period in the tenancy agreement (we could have pushed off the next day if we’d wanted to), they told her that legally they are not obliged to state one because she had not specified one herself at the time.  A change of tune methinks.

Anyway, the upshot is, that we have found a flouse to live in.  I think it is REALLY cool.  JT is warming to it but most people I tell about it think I am bonkers.  So I thought I’d try to explain it with a few pictures.  It is located above a jewellers in an arty area of Cheltenham.  You go through a back gate and up an alleyway past a house with MASSIVE wooden doors.  They are beautiful.  You then go in through an entrance which is shared with the jewellery studio.  You go in through the front door and up some stairs to the master bedroom:

This bed is being removed…  You will notice, if you look carefully, that the ceiling is an interesting artistic attempt at some sort of tent!  Odd. Never mind.  Round the corner to the right of the image is an alcove and another wardrobe.  This bedroom leads into the most awesome en-suite bathroom:

This bathroom is being painted and tiled.  I am looking forward to lying in the bath and looking at the stars.  Luckily this window is only overlooked by our kitchen!!  To the right of the image is a cupboard with the washing machine in it.  Behind the photo is a toilet. So yes, the bathroom is actually bigger than this!

If you go upstairs you reach a sitting room:

I love this room.  It has a funky fireplace and a bay window seat that overlooks the Suffolks.  How cool?  You then go up some more stairs and reach a second bathroom (shower room really) and kitchen:

The main appeal of this kitchen was that you can actually fit more than one person in it!  Behind the photo is a window and a small table with chairs and some shelves.  You go up yet more stairs and reach the second bedroom:

This is a good size with more wardrobes and a nice view again, out over the Suffolks.
So there is our flouse.  We hope.  We are holding it tomorrow and moving 4th March.  It is just amazing what is on the rental market at the moment.  We have seen some places that are just uninhabitable!!  There is bad quirky and good quirky.  This is good quirky.  A flat where you would struggle to fit a single bed in the bedroom let alone a super-king, with a kitchen that you have to walk through sideways and a toilet that you have to reverse onto because it is down the side of the bath is bad quirky.  We saw a load of places that cost about £650 a month, that were tiny, dirty (not just in need of decoration but actually dirty) and not very nice.  The agents stand there being all cocky saying “Well you’re not going to find anything better!”  as if we’re lucky to get a home at all for that price.  Crazy times.  One place we looked at was ridiculous.  You walked through the front door and you were in the sitting room, which was about 2.5 square metres (seriously!)  There was then a kitchen the same size and a ‘reverse onto the loo’ bathroom.  Upstairs were two ‘bedrooms’ that, again, wouldn’t fit our bed.  The old lady who lived there was a chain smoker so it all smelt lovely.  She had also probably just died there.  £650 PCM.  Unbelievable.

Emma’s gorgeous baby Oliver is competing to be the new face of Snug Baby!  Please take 2 seconds to vote for him by clicking on the little red heart here.

It is times like these that all you can do is turn to the big man and ask for help.  Sometimes you don’t know where to start with the Bible, so music that is written based on the Bible is a really good source of strength.  I also find that it sticks in my head.  Today I had two songs in my head when I woke up.  One is by my good friend Jesus and transmitted via another good friend - Jamie Hill.  It is called Jesus All I Have.  The line that was in my head was “I may not understand, I will trust you Lord”.

The other song was by my good friend Jesus and transmitted by a great band, Phatfish.  The song is called Faithful and here is an extract:
You are faithful to me
And will never cease to be
All Your promises will come to pass
In Your power and sovereignty
You are faithful and true
Perfect timing in all You do
So I?ll never stop trusting You
You are God and You are good
So good to me

Great is Your love
You lift up my head
When darkness surrounds me
Tender You are
Holding me close
You never let go

This is hard to sing sometimes when things feel hard, but if we acknowledge that it is true, then it breaks the weight of all else that is happening.  So I say Go God!

We would appreciate your prayers. Twinkle, after being hit by a car, is doing miraculously well.  She is still in a lot of pain and requires a LOT of effort to look after.  However, now Monty has gone missing.  We have no idea where he is.  Please pray that he would return to my parents’ house, where he has been stayng to give Twinkle some space.

..Or at least online!  The subscribers have their copy of Design Week, but WHSmith are running a day late with the deliveries.  However, my “Business Insight” article can be found here.  I am slightly edited and misquoted in places, but it is largely what I wrote.

Ok so the BT situation has got worse….  8 days offline now and this is what has happened…

I received 4 emails, thanking me for ordering a new BT business line and Broadband option 2 (all laid out as if we’d had a carefully considered conversation).  We have now spent two further days on the phone asking why on EARTH Broadband is being installed on 2nd Feb when we don’t want it.  All we want is our phone line back.

It turns out, they haven’t just suspended our phone line, they have cut it completely.  So now they have to install a new one and they are trying to charge us £99 for the privilege!!!  Not only that, but I have received a bill this morning for £230 early termination fee from my previous 5 year contract!!!

I phoned to say that under no circumstance would I be paying that bill, or a re-connection fee because not only am I filing for compensation for loss of earnings whilst I piggy back onto a wifi connection from next door which cuts out every two minutes (literally), but it is not my fault in any way that this has happened!!!  I am furious.  The guy who is now helping us is “speaking to his manager” (again) because apparently she is trying to establish whether it was me purposely not paying my bill (which he said was “probably” unlikely) or whether in fact they hadn’t sent a bill.  How difficult can it be??  If they look at their computers they will notice that no bill has been issued.
I could not be more irritated!!  I so do not need this when I have a house to look for (and the joys of updating addresses especially when they say “where hve you lived in the last three years?”), a very sick cat at home who I have to attend to several times a day, a business to run (with a very sketchy internet connection), people who owe us money, people we owe money to, etc etc.  Housework?  Food?  What are they??  Haha.  One thing I can be immensely grateful for is my family and good friends.

I know that Owen will sympathise with this post.  I feel the need to express my utter disgust at the telecoms company that boasts that “every day hundreds of people come back to BT”.  What a joke!!  DO NOT, under any circumstance, use this good for nothing company, that does not even deserve to have its bills lining the cat’s litter tray.  You will have to forgive me, as I am particularly cross anyway this week, but BT have made my misery complete.

I moved into my office on 1st July 2009.  I had a telephone line installed but it nearly wasn’t installed because the engineer turned up at the wrong address.  He couldn’t just go a few doors down the road because apparently that would require some admin, which is something that BT are clearly abysmal at.

I finally got the line installed.  Not through choice, but out of necessity, since this money grabbing bunch of turnips-for-brains hold the monopoly on telephone lines.  When they privatised, they could have invested all that money into actually making their service good, but instead, they employed the monkeys who I will shortly describe and proceeded to make most of Britain miserable.

I do not use the BT line for phonecalls, I have VOIP phones and 02 broadband.  However, the broadband requires a phone line.  Since the line was installed, I have received no correspondence from them whatsoever.  No bill, no acknowledgement of the line being installed, nothing.  By December I was wondering where the bill was and assumed I was being billed quarterly.  I had thought that maybe I should check.

One snowy day in January (last week), my internet and phones go dead.  For a company that operates largely online, this is somewhat crippling.  I called BT with the intention of resolving the issue, paying what I owe (the only reason I hadn’t paid is because I didn’t know what I owed or who to pay!) and getting back online.

I kid you not.  I spoke to 13 representatives of BT for 1.5 hours.

Number 1: Couldn’t help, needed another department
Number 2: Couldn’t help, needed another department
Number 3: I said “I really don’t want to be cut short as I don’t seem to be getting anywhere, I wonder if you could help me?” She replied “I don’t have to put up with this” and hung up on me.
NUmber 4: (Fuming now) told me I’d been treated appallingly and that they’d put me through to someone who could help
Number 5: “Hello!??! Oh sorry hello madam” - obviously picked up the call which had been thrown into cyber space.  No idea what was going on.  This lad turned out to be as thick as pig poo and got really stroppy saying “Well it isn’t my fault if you don’t pay your bill is it???  What do you want ME to do about it?!”  I said that if he had a corporate responsibility as a representative of his company and that without a bill, it was absolutely his fault that I had not paid it.  In fact, if he could tell me who to pay and how much, I would very much like to pay my bill.
Number 6: I had asked to be put through to a manger.  Ended up with yet another member of the customer sales team who didn’t know the situation.  She put me through to my account manager, a Mr Ian Medley.
Number 7: Not Ian Medley at all, but some other idiot.  I am seriously seething now, but trying to remain calm. I end up saying to this person “Can I just ask what I should do??  I am in a hopeless situation.  I owe you money, but you won’t let me pay.  What do you want to do about that?”
Number 8: Can’t find my address
Number 9: Can’t deal with me without a landline number despite finding my address
Number 10: Can find my address but not my account
NUmber 11: Very rude, so I ask to speak to a manager.
NUmber 12: Not a manager, yet again.  Doesn’t know why I have been put through to him
NUmber 13: Goes through the whole scenario, tells me my account details, says reassuringly “Oh yeah you’ve been cut off”.  When I ask why, he says “Oh the engineers don’t have to give a reason”.  I explode at this point and tell him that he’d better get me back online and send out an engineer, as this would not take 7 working days.  He says that he can only put in a request.  I rant some more and he assures me that (after apparently speaking to his manager), he will get me a call back within 8 working hours and the line will be active within one to two working days.

When the call did not arrive with one working hour to spare, I let my grace and mercy leave my side.  I set the Rayfield on them.  Mark phoned them up and finally got through to someone helpful.  Helpful man actually confessed that number 13 had simply promised the call and the re-connection to pacify me, because I was annoyed.  CAN YOU BELIEVE IT???  So there was no chance of being reconnected within 1-2 working days and now in fact we had wasted another day.  Mark got his direct line and demanded compensation for loss of earnings, which they have promised to file for.

However, my confidence is low, because we have not sorted the bill issue and until that bill has been paid, I am certain they will not reconnect us.  There has been no communication since and we are still not online.  OUr 02 account has been suspended and we have 30 days to resolve it.

I am livid.  How on earth can managers sleep at night knowing that their employees treat people like this??

I think I might have just had one of the worst weeks ever.  In the space of a week:

*  Our landlady decides to sell our house, meaning we have to move for the 5th time in 4 years
*  Our landlady also decides to put our rent up
*  I lost my temper with a  client (this has never happened before)
*  Two clients in one day expect work for peanuts and are rude
*  A really important meeting gets re-scheduled
*  My little cat gets hit by a car and her life hangs in the balance.  We think she will be ok now, but the laxatives they have given her are taking their toll and she is not able to control it because it hurts her too much to poop. Nervous about what the vets will say tomorrow.
*  As a result of the cat getting hit and needing a lot of care, I have hardly slept for days
*  As a result of the cat getting hit, our credit card bill is massive and we have to hope our insurance works out!
*  I left my handbag at Sainsbury’s - miraculously I got it back
*  I locked myself out of the house
*  BT randomly cut off our phone line at work.  More about this later.  No phone, no broadband.  Excellent.
*  The car is making a funny noise, which sounds expensive
*  My solicitor is STILL dithering about my insurance claim for a car crash in August

I am so tired and miserable, it is days like this where you just want to curl up in a duvet and hide.

We are really thrilled to announce a “Business Insight” article being published by Design Week on 28th January, written by yours truly.  Available from all good book shops that sell magazines!