eptivity

As you may well be aware, Internets, I don’t have access to you at home. This is why:

We live in a brand new building. When one moves into a brand new building here, not only is one required to purchase fixtures like bathroom mirrors and towel racks, but one is also required to arrange for the phone line to be installed. We heard this rumor from our letting agent that our landlord would probably be willing to split the cost with us, but this did not come to fruition, which leaves us to pay the £124 installation fee. Fine. Not ideal, but whatevs. A phone line is mandatory for broadband so I can work from home; we will pay $248 to have it installed.

I call the phone company and made an appointment for an engineer to come out and activate the line, a mere 2.5 weeks from my initial call. On the appointed date, no engineer appears or calls to explain why, so I call the phone company to inquire. Phone company reports that the line is active HOORAY! I have no way to test it, however, as it turns out that UK phone jacks are different than ours, so our American phone is useless for this task. One £4 testing phone later, we have…no phone service. No dialtone, no static, nothing. Stephan takes the phone to work the next day to make sure the phone isn’t defective. It’s not.

I try to call the phone company, only my cellphone has inexplicably stopped allowing me to call them. When I finally get to talk to them (a story in itself), they run a line test and confirm that, indeed, the phone line is active and there are no problems from their end.

I call the letting agent, as it appears to be a problem with the wiring inside the actual building. Unfortunately, it is now Bank Holiday Weekend, which means no one can do anything for another 3 days.

Five days later, the letting agent finally puts me in touch with the construction company customer service.

A quick, informational aside: Apparently, what happens here is that each residence has a primary phone socket, which is what we are paying £124 to activate. If one wants any of the other sockets in your home (”extensions”) activated, it’s an additional £60 (each? Not sure; skipping that, thank you). Our particular apartment has what our letting agents like to call a “media panel,” which has a few outlets, satellite feed for our TV, phone sockets, etc. It may surprise you to learn that this convenient, centrally located panel in our living room is, in fact, not the location of our primary phone line; it’s the extension. The primary phone line is the two bare wires sticking out of the wall in the second bedroom.

Apparently only the construction company guy had this key piece of information at hand.

“One last call” to the phone company today, to request an engineer coming out to install what Stephan and I like to call “a FREAK-ing phone socket.”

Another quick, informational aside: For some reason known only to themselves, the phone company (British Telecom) has the most horrible system of customer service I’ve ever experienced. I have no fewer than 5 BT “customer service” numbers to all different departments that they have given me at one time or another, none of which has at any time actually connected me with someone who can help me. I always have to be transferred by a person who is very wearied by my inability to dial the correct number. Try this for fun when you have a few hours to kill sometime: go to BT.com, and just try to find a contact number. I dare you!

Call no. 1: “helped” by 3 different people in different departments, including 15 minutes of on-hold time, culminating in my line being picked up by an operator who apparently cannot hear me repeatedly shouting “hello?” over the sounds of—NOTE: if you read nothing else, read this next part—him singing “Can’t Touch This.” Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

Call no. 2: “helped” by 3 different people in different departments (despite calling the number that someone specifically gave me in the last call, I still don’t get the right department), including 12 minutes of on-hold time, and two different people trying to correct my address, culminating in my being cut off because I run out of minutes on my pay-as-you-go phone.

Call no. 2.5: call to the pay-as-you-go phone people to top up my phone; amazingly, good, prompt, efficient service.

Call no. 3: “helped” by 3 different people in different departments before finally, finally reaching someone is a) is helpful b) speaks clearly c) actually apologizes for my troubles. Hope! The future of BT is in your hands!