Nathan to the rescue

I need to add an appendix to my last post, as I am now at home and ON LINE. You’d have thought frustration levels couldn’t have risen from Monday, but there were a number of developments in our Virgin Media saga. 

1. On returning from the internet café I saw some neighbours who also use Virgin Media and learned that they were having no problems. Conclusion it was not an area problem. We passed the information on to VM.

2. I began to receive text messages:

“Virgin Media Outage Update – ID F…..532. We’re pleased to tell you this issue is now fixed. Best wishes, the Virgin Media Team.” Great news – except it still wasn’t. So I wrote a message saying, “No, it’s not. Please come and sort it out.” Only it refused to be sent. Presumably Virgin have a one-way only text number. 

3. On Monday evening and again early on Tuesday, we had phone messages from Bangladesh saying a technician would come and sort things out for us. Yippee! But 30 minutes and 60 minutes later we received more phone messages telling us the issue was now fixed. It wasn’t. And so I rang VM and told them. As Jane was out I couldn’t go through their standardised rigmarole of checking the router lights etc which Jane had done twice before. 

Somehow the chap in Bangladesh understood me sufficiently and in the end said that indeed a technician would come and help that morning. Well, Nathan (for he was the longed-for technician) arrived. He ran checks and changed the router. Still it was not working…. So he went to the local junction box and found that our line hadn’t been labelled and had a “noise blocker” on it. When and why it was put there is a mystery, but now at last we’re on line again. Phew! Nathan said we might receive a customer satisfaction survey. That was to do with his performance – not Virgin Media’s. If it were the latter, it would be way into negative scores. Nathan’s would be highly positive. Thanks, Nathan.

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!

Home thoughts from home

I hope you'll forgive me if I bring my blog down to domestic matters while the tragedy of the Japanese earthquake aftermath continues to unravel. The immensity of the death and missing toll (17,000) and number who are homeless (over a million), the collapse of infrastructure, the sub-zero temperatures and the unfolding nuclear power station disaster - no wonder their Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, described it as the country's worst catastrophe after the 2nd World War and said that the whole nation would have to rebuild from scratch.

The home story that heated my sub-collar area most was the report that Westminster City Council have dreamed up a scheme to make it a criminal offence to give food or drink to homeless people and to fine people sitting on the streets £500. It's variously surmised that this is the first step to clearing up the streets of London before the 2012 Olympics, or preempting the expected increase in homelessness following changes in housing benefits. More charitable people wonder whether the council might have plans to provide shelter and food to the nearly 150 homeless in the area. Watching David Cameron giving his statement about Libya in the Commons today, I noticed sitting on the front bench next to Nick Noddy Clegg, Sir George Young, Leader of the House and Lord Privy Seal, who once famously, or infamously, defined 'the homeless' as "people you step over when you leave the opera". Words like "whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of water" came to mind and the reward, as far as I understood, wasn't a criminal charge. I'm not quite clear whether this is already a by-law or being considered. I sincerely hope it's the latter and will be dropped with the contempt it deserves.

Yesterday the BBC published research they'd commissioned from 'a leading firm of accountants' about the new rate of student loans. They concluded that if a student took out a loan over three years of £39,000 and had above-average pay-increases, he'd end up paying more than double what he borrowed. Apparently, according to the minister, this is half way between a credit card debt and income tax, and is "a good deal". It certainly is for the government. But I imagine loan sharks say the same!

I was pleased to see internecine strife amongst journalists when Panorama did a programme on the dark arts, in particular practised by The News of the World. This involved illegal phone tapping and computer hacking. A bit disturbing was the alleged obtaining of police information with money. Scotland Yard, we were told, had reopened the case. Hopefully they will be rigorous even in examining themselves.

And finally in the week when the BMA (the doctors' professional association) Council voted for a withdrawal and reshaping of the government's NHS Bill I was interested to learn that Richard Branson already owns a number of GP practices. I assume it's through Virgin Healthcare. I don't think my local practice could be improved, nor the services I receive, but I can believe that he might do a good job running services - though, come to think of it, I'm not sure that Virgin gives us a better service on our phones than the good old Post Office phone service used to. However the image isn't bad!

"Your surgery's either got it or it hasn't."