Chorus hit bum notes

Oh my blog I’m running late. And why am I running late? Because this has been a week of hassles beyond belief, that’s why. But as with everything in life, you have to take what lessons you can from it and my lesson for this week was that you have to speak up and make a fuss if you are not happy. And don’t mince your words if somebody has really stuffed you around; go on the attack.

So why am I so fired up? Well the first thing to get me going this week was a problem with my Internet connection. I say this week, but in actual fact this problem has been with us for months. We had complained to Vodaclone many times and they weren’t listening properly. You see the fault is a regular one that causes our connection to drop out virtually every day at approximately the same time of the day (within a 3 hour window at the most), and it lasts between 2 and 15 minutes each time.

When you get a problem that is as predictable in its behaviour as this, it is more likely than not to have the same cause each time. Yet Yodafone didn’t seem to be able to understand this and each time put us through the usual nonsense of switching off the modem and the computer waiting 3 minutes....if you’ve ever had to deal with these companies you will know the rest of the script. And therein resides the first problem. It is a bloody script. I am convinced these people have been given little or no training whatsoever and instead been issued with a list of FAQs and the corporate answers that must be used to customers. Should the customer ask about something that was forgotten in the FAQ list, the call centre operative finds the next nearest one and answers with that. After analysing the answers I was given I came to the conclusion this must be the case as they were all so carefully structured and rigid. Each time I queried the logic it resulted in a long wait listening to poorly recorded and mostly awful music while the operative rushed off to their supervisor for advice or another handful of ‘stupid’ pills.

That is the background to this fiasco. Zapping forward to the present, things came to a head last week when we got fed up again and decided to insist on somebody coming and sorting the problem out. We reasoned there must be a simple explanation for it and it was looking increasingly like some sort of outside force was impacting on our connection each day. Somebody must be doing something around that time each day that affects our line. This time for no apparent reason we were taken more seriously and told Chorus would be sent out to check on the fault. He was to come on Friday 16 September at around 1.30pm. We told them the tech had to contact us before he came or turned anything off as we needed to know for work flow reasons.

Friday ended with no sight or sound of any technician. On Saturday we went out for part of the day and when we got home there was a message on our answerphone saying the tech had been but we weren’t home and to ring for ‘another appointment’ which was rich since he hadn’t turned up for his first appointment. On the Sunday we also got a text saying something else which I am still struggling to understand. My best guess was they were coming at 7pm that night (once again without making an appointment).

Sunday came and went unlike the Chorus guy who did neither. On Monday I received another text saying they had been again and we weren’t home and to make another appointment. This time we had not been out so we knew this was complete bollox.

So I rang Chorust Almighty and asked them what they were talking about. It transpired they had gone to an address in Pyes Pa that is not remotely similar to ours and where we have never lived.
My next call was to Vodastone and they got an earful for giving the Choruster the wrong address.
By this stage my pupils had disappeared and my head was about to start doing 360s. I hurled myself upon my unfortunate victim savaging her ferociously and demanding compensation. My teeth had barely grazed her skin before she conceded and admitted they had fucked up owed me BIG TIME. All good. However we still had that matter of an Internet connection that likes to disconnect itself for a while each morning.

So it was agreed the Sodaphone person would inflict some of the nasty wounds I had given her on the contracted choir and arrange for their tech to come to the correct address – always useful if you want to fix the correct connection. She promised he would come at around 11am that day (to the correct address).

You just knew this couldn’t just self correct at this time, didn’t you? And you are so right. The technician who looked about 17 turned up to meet a very angry Writerman who said unto him, ‘It’s a good job you turned up now because the Internet is off again – and this is the second time this morning.” Yeah, I’ve just been working on it,” the fresh faced fool then said.

Of course he claimed nobody had told him we needed to know BEFORE he turned things off. At this point my wife remarked the company was probably called Chorus because they all seem to be singing from the same song sheet.  To which I said, but what a shame none of them can sing in tune?

As of this writing we still haven’t had the fault fixed although the Song & Dance company have stuck a 72 hour analyser on the line to find out what is happening. So we wait yet again, but as I have already pointed out to Vodagroan my meter is running and the longer it takes the more it will cost them.