After various outages and glitches with leased lines and PRi lines BT started February with a scorcher – complete outage (which their automatic monitoring equipment caught as an alarm and their snoozing engineers ignored). Our clients noticed within 45 milliseconds and were on the phone to us.
After trying various reporting numbers (which seem to have changed since we reported last – as in last week) I finally got hold of my account manager who gave me another number (which was the wrong one too but thankfully the guy on that line had been woken up and gave me the correct ISP Repair line – wooppee I could finally speak to a person about a major outage. Especially since the last outage saw an engineer finally coming down to the remote exchange without the likely parts and was just going off his shift so they had to send someone else in from 40 miles away who would definitely have the correct part – I reckoned that he must have walked as the line wasn’t actually repaired until the morning.
He gave me the fault number and said that that number came from a test which verified there was a fault – so it could be quickly dealt with – great I thought. Hours later this wasn’t so great – each hourly keep-the-sucker-up-to-date-with-our-lies BT phone call, which started with optimism, was starting to grind me down – well we haven’t allocated an engineer to the job yet (this is 4 hours into the fault) and they have some medieval set of procedures (probably based on some Masonic ritual) which more or less guaranteed that whatever language or tone I was using wasn’t going to see this job escalated.
Five hours in – no engineer – surely they are not actually training one from scratch or have they outsourced this to India too – although the neandrathal I spoke to on the last BT call (well they gave up calling me on the hour every hour as promised) was a triumph of genetic engineering, in case you wondered what happened to the Silverfin drug – its in a British Telecom worker.
The engineer arrived and within 5 minutes had the line working which he then took down for testing (lets make sure it works this time test) 7 hours into the fault and we had Internet access again. BT called back and in an unguarded moment admitted that they had botched up the job before.
I used to say that the reason that we paid well over the odds for our telecoms was that it was reliable (natch) and that if there was a problem then this was repaired very quickly as local engineers were on the scene quickly. Now we are ripping our leased lines out and using bonded DSL to speak to our colocation site with dire threats to local exchange users about the exchange being monitored for PSP file transfers and movie downloads, and advising them that the only safe way to surf is with images off, to maximise my contention rate.
