On 22 Dec 2009, at 9:01 am, Paul Oldham wrote: > I have always been impressed with VM engineers on the ground. I > remember > some years ago now when there was a power cut which affected the Coles > Road/Old School Lane area. We were in a parish council meeting in the > community centre so we decamped to the pavilion on The Sycamores. > > Coming back Coles Road was still in darkness but outside the VM > boxes at > the entrance to Coles Road was a VM van with a petrol generator > running. > It was clearly powering their boxes because although Coles Road had no > power they did have phones back (and broadband I seem to remember as > we > were affected too, although we did have power but discovered our > broadband came via Coles Road). > > So rather than blaming EDF they'd come out and got phones back up, > which > from a safety standpoint has to be a Good Plan. What was so frustrating was that it's completely impossible to contact these people who actually know what's going on in order to give them useful information about the cause of a fault. Instead you have to call a brainless moron in a call centre who isn't capable of deviating one iota from his script, which as far as I can tell consists of only three items: 1. Tell the customer to power cycle their set-top box or cable modem as appropriate. 2. If that doesn't work, book an engineer *to look at their set top box*. Under no circumstances is the engineer to be called to look at VM's own infrastructure, because it's impossible for that to go wrong[1] 3. If you've reached this point, it's imperative not to take any notice of anything the customer says, no matter how relevant.[2] Remember it's always the customer's fault, and it's important you get them to waste a day's holiday waiting for an engineer to arrive who'll just confirm there's nothing wrong with their setup. Tim [1] I've actually had one of the call centre robots, on a previous occasion when everything stopped immediately after an engineer did something to the same green junction box, say that to me. [2] Actually, that's not quite true. One one occasion, one Bangalore droid did take notice of what I said. Sufficiently that he then started asking *me* for help in setting up DNS/DHCP in his home wireless network, because he couldn't. Needless to say he still didn't actually do anything as far as my Virgin Media technical fault was concerned. -- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.