Furthermore: July 2004

July 30, 2004

Children’s Theatre Marquee

Looks like might be fun: Children’s Theatre Marquee - on Jesus Green I believe.

The penultimate chapter?

Engineer came out yesterday and spent 2 hours tracing a line fault. The phone is now working again. Interestingly, he said that the call out on Monday was marked as cancelled - and that certainly wasn’t us. Not only that, but he said he needed help to open the NTL box on the street, so that casts some doubt on what we were told about the call.

Anyway, the final thing is to sort out some sort of compensation - not today though, I can’t bear to talk to them again. Also, if we leave it over the weekend, it’ll at least give us some idea if the phone is going to continue working.

July 29, 2004

Links

• Hiring a Sales Guy - good piece on when you need sales people.


• New Yorker - excellent piece on the Madrid bombings, and online terrorism.

cam.misc news

A couple of interesting things I saw recently:

• Netscan - MSR project allows you to get stats on newsgroups.



• Chris Lightfoot - more cam.misc stats


• cam.misc wiki - the FAQ has now migrated to this wiki.


• Resources for Cambridge Parents - not really cam.misc related, but looks very useful.

more NTL

Quick update - Janine called my wife back and said that she’d arrange for an engineer to phone and make an appointment. She said she’d phone to check it had happened. Good to her word, she phoned again (no engineer had called) and shortly after that, lo, an engineer did phone and made an appointment to come the next afternoon (ie, today - the 29th). Janine phoned again to check it had happened. All in all, not bad service for a change. Still no working phone though.

July 28, 2004

Links

• Getting Things Done - good article on self motivation via JoS


• Geometric Origami - amazing paper folding (including curved folds) from the guy who invented Huffman encoding!


• Stock Markets - interesting piece (again via JoS) on share dealing and trading.


• My Dinner with Bill - description of one intern’s visit to Bill G’s Xanadu. Via Scoble.



• cam.misc thread - on TV licensing and broadband PCs. Remember you heard it here first.

More NTL woes

The latest installment. I’ve not heard anything further from my complaint to Mr Hussain. I am going to cancel if I don’t get a resolution very soon now.

• 2004/7/26 (Mon) - my wife waited in for the engineer. Eventually phoned in and was initially told that we had cancelled an appointment on Friday. This was totally untrue so she spoke to Sian who figured out that the engineer had been out, but had only been to the NTL box on our corner, and had neglected to come to the house to say he was finished. The service still needs some internal work done apparently, and Sian estimated it would be working on Wednesday.


• 2004/7/28 (Wed) - My wife spoke to Tracy who told her that there seemed to be a problem with the way the number had been ported from BT on June 3 and that we should phone them to report the fault as BT wouldn’t do anything otherwise. I phoned BT and they assured me that all their tasks had been completed successfully. My wife phoned back to NTL and Tracy said she couldn’t do anything further, but said she thought we’d been treated very badly, and said her supervisor, Janine, would call us this afternoon.

July 23, 2004

Letter of complaint to NTL

Here’s the letter I wrote to Aizad Hussain:

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:59:14

Dear Mr Hussain,

I am writing to you after having a very disappointing experience with your

customer service team in Cambridge. On Friday last week I noticed that my phone

service had been disconnected. No engineer was available to fix it until

Monday, so my family was without phone service for the better part of 4 days.


This is the second time this same fault has occurred (on the first occasion the

service was disconnected for a week and we got a months rental as compensation)

and the problem is entirely an NTL one - our number is apparently being treated

as temporary and reallocated periodically.

When I phoned customer service to ask for some compensation, I was offered one

pound, on the basis that line rental is �9.50 and this works out about 30p a

day. A supervisor confirmed that this is all that would be offered to me. The

supervisor would also not confirm that the same problem would not occur again.

This may well be a policy decision, but it is not good customer service. There


are two key things here: firstly, if I can’t get a phone service from you that

is reliable, I shall have to go back to BT - I switched so I could bundle

cable, phone and (in the future) broadband from one provider - I don’t want to

go back, but having a working phone is a necessity. Someone needs to assure me

that the necessary steps are taken so that the same problem doesn’t happen

again.

Second, it isn’t really about the money - I’d much rather have a working phone


and pay you a fair rate for it than have to write this kind of email. I just

want a token acknowledgement that you made a mistake. BT would offer a months

rental in these circumstances. A pound is an insult.

Finally, I ought to just point out the outstanding service I got from Neil

S, the engineer that visited us both times this problem has occurred.

Thank you for your time. I hope you can help me with this matter.

yours sincerely,

Matt Freestone

NTL Woes

Since I signed up with NTL around the end of May (to take advantage of their cable+Talk 24 offer), I’ve had recurring problems with my line being disconnected. This post is going to cover all the contacts I’ve had with them so far. I’ll let you know when this is sorted out one way or another.

• 2004/6/9 (Wed) - phone disconnected.


• 2004/6/10 (Thu) - rang service centre but nobody called back.



• 2004/6/11 (Fri) - spoke to Peter I (very helpful). Engineer booked for Saturday.


• 2004/6/12 (Sat) - engineer called Saturday afternoon. Told us phone was fixed and gave us a new temporary number. I didn’t think to test the phone before he left, but ten minutes later it wasn’t working again. The new number we were given was already in use by someone else. Customer service is closed, but if you have a loss of dial tone out of hours they give you another number to try. Called them and spoke to John R at ANMC Bromley. Very apologetic, but he can’t do anything, and there are no engineers who can come out.


• 2004/6/14 (Mon) - spoke to Wayne L. He says the problem has been closed and that the line should be working. It’s not, so we have an engineer booked for Tuesday.


• 2004/6/15 - engineer Neil S calls and fixes the problem.



• 2004/6/16? - phoned to complain about the loss of service and I’m offered a month’s line rental - �25 as compensation, which I’m happy to accept. All seems well, until…


• 2004/7/16 (Fri) - phone disconnected. Reported fault to Lyndon E. Engineer booked for Monday.


• 2004/7/19 (Mon) - spoke to John about billing error (did I mention this was wrong as well?). Said Sales was closed and he needed to talk to them and get them to ring me back. Nobody rang back, so I spoke to someone else a bit later who agreed the bill was wrong. She said she would alter the package and we should see our credit on the next bill.


• 2004/7/19 (Mon) - engineer Neil S called and fixed the connection. He said the problem was that our number was on a list of temporary numbers, and that this was why it was being disconnected. He said he would tell the relevant people and get them to phone us back to make sure the fix had been done.



• 2004/7/20 (Tue) - spoke to Rhona about compensation for loss of service. She calculated our line rental was about 31p / day (line rent is �9.50 and month separate from the talk 24 package) and that we were therefore owed about �1. I said it wasn’t good enough and asked to talk to a supervisor. Scott M called back and reconfirmed what Rhona had said. He also wouldn’t guarantee that the problem wouldn’t occur again. I was pretty fed up at this point and went hunting around the web and found the cableforum site (my thread). They were very helpful and I composed an email of complaint to the UK MD Aizad Hussain. I figured it was more likely to get somewhere than writing to the address on the back of the bill at any rate.


• 2004/7/21 (Wed) - got a response to my email via Peter I on behalf of Gavin L, saying they were looking into the complaint. I replied to Peter with my understanding of what needed to be fixed.


• 2004/7/22 (Thu) - phone went down in the evening. Called the out of hours support line but no response after leaving my details.



• 2004/7/23 (Fri) - spoke to Chris at the service centre around 8am. Explained the issue about the temporary number. He said he would investigate and get back to me. Around 11.30 I thought I’d phone again to see what was happening. Spoke to Daryl, who said he had no record of the previous contact. He spoke to several people, who seemed to tell him conflicting things about the line - that it was disconnected, active, etc. Booked an engineer for Tuesday. He said he couldn’t redirect our line to a mobile.


• 2004/7/23 (Fri) - My wife phoned them (now they’re in trouble) to say that Tuesday was not acceptable. She spoke to a chap called Andrew who seemed to take the complaints more seriously - he’s got our appointment moved to Monday, and will talk to his supervisor if anything can be done sooner.

That’s the story so far, watch this space for breaking news.

July 21, 2004

Bits and Bobs

Still in a bit of a slump at the moment - I just can’t seem to motivate myself to do very much. Yesterday was the deadline for comments on the ID cards consultation - missed that. Last night on TV I saw the appeal by the Disaster Emergency Committee appeal for Darfour. You can give online at that site, and I urge you to do so.

I’m having an ongoing problem with NTL’s phone service at the moment, so I may post some gripes about that soon, depending on how things are resolved.

July 12, 2004

Comment Spam

The other thing that annoyed me just lately was that I got onto the list of some pretty industrious porn comment spammers. I had the odd comment before, but these guys clocked up over 360 comments in a very short space of time. I’ve turned off comments globally for now, but I’m very disappointed to have to do so. It’s not like I was overwhelmed with responses, but a few people have commented on a few threads, and I like that.

I may upgrade and install typekey or something, but I don’t really have time at the moment for that kind of fiddling.

Blogging hiatus

I seem not to have blogged anything for nearly 3 weeks, which wasn’t an entirely conscious choice - although blogging burn-out seems to be a topic du jour. It was more a combination of circumstances - some personal worries (now resolved positively), and a large dose of domestic chaos as we re-decorated the study which meant the PC was packed away for a while.

For the same reason, I haven’t really been as interested in what’s going on - Darfour, Iraq, ID cards and the rest have all proceeded to go bad in various ways without any intervention from me. I feel something of a tension between wanting to speak up on what I consider to be important issues and realising that my voice is really not important to the outcome (not mentioning any Home Office Consultations on ID cards in particular you understant) and I might as well spend my time elsewhere.

I used to be quite active in Amnesty International at a local group level (my ancient html skillz are still largely visible in the design of AIBG) and that seemed to hit a sweet spot between commitment and personal reward. Since moving to Cambridge though, and particularly since having a family, it’s much harder to get involved in anything where I feel I can have an impact.

That seems to lead me towards reading a lot of political stuff as a substitute, which becomes kind of frustrating - reading about politics bearing a similar relation to activism as porn does to sex. A substitute, but ultimately unsatisfying.