daily life: this is Moscow calling

I had a scary moment yesterday. It is 10pm and I am watching some TV on my HTPC. Then, shock horror, I lose my internet connection. I glance at the router and the internet light is Orange, the router instructs me that their is an issue with the line, but just to be sure I restart it before coming to the realisation that I must phone BT. And so begins the worst 24 minutes of my life.

Firstly I phone to check if any faults are reported for my area, but sadly there are not.
I have to go through to Tech Support who are based in India.
While on hold I am instructed to visit www.bt.com for online help, okay then, I'll go do that when you fix my internetz.

When I finally get through to a 'technical advisor' she immediately instructs me to reset my router to factory defaults, which I politely refuse to do. After 10 minutes of battling, repeating every word 5 times, agreeing to be referred to as Ireye because I can't get her to understand my name is Matthew, she agrees to perform a line test and promptly promises to phone me back in 10 minutes.
25 minutes later I get a call, and the 'advisor' agrees that there is a fault with my line - Good job you hadn't instructed me to reset my router to factory defaults then. And they promise that an engineer is looking into it.

At 11pm on the dot my internetz are back, albeit at a reduced sync speed of just 8mb.

Then this morning BT phone me from India to ask if my problems are resolved, after 5 minutes of NPA where I tell the advisor I DON'T need assistance setting up my Wi-Fi, that my Xbox 360 and PS3 are working fine and that my BT Vision Box has been unplugged for 12months because it is rubbish, whilst being referred to as Mr Iran (Don't ask), I finally get off the phone.


I do have to hand it to BT that they can be efficient in fixing a fault, and the processes for making sure everything is fine the next day are a nice touch. But for the love of God, please can I speak to somebody who can string a sentence together in English. Repeating yourself 10 times over is not going to impress your customers. When you are continually referred to by the wrong name you get a bit annoyed. It's bad enough that the 'advisor' quotes a script that can't possibly resolve your fault.

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