Automated falsehoods?

On Friday our internet went down. We’re with Virgin Media, which has served us well thus far. After a time we rang the help number and heard a message apologising for the break in service to our road’s post code, and as it was more complex than usual it would take longer but their engineers were hard at work on it.

The next day it still wasn’t working and so we rang again. The same message. We gave a mobile number for text updates. This morning three days after the original fault and after no texts we decided we wanted to hear something more than an automated message, and so we navigated through to a voice (possibly in India). The nice lady told us there was a local outage and it should be sorted by Friday… A good thing I’m not employed from home. Then Jane pointed out there’d been no engineers in the area. The troubleshooter then ran some diagnostic tests on our system. “Make sure all the plugs are in the sockets. What are the lights doing? Push the switch on the bottom. Etc etc.” Naturally we wondered about the “area outage.” Don’t worry, we were told, we would now be “escalated.” Jane hoped there'd be some rebate on our bill. I think she was told that there was a standard OffCom compensation of £8 per 24 hours - maybe Virgin Media will be paying us next month....

So I have come to our local internet café to catch up with emails – and to vent my frustration with what are apparently automated obfuscations – or possible lies. Perhaps when I get back, our home internet will be restored – some hope!