Companies To Hate: British Telecom

When I last moved house, I was painfully aware of how difficult those first few weeks are before having all the techy bits set up – no Sky (the house didn’t even have an aerial, so it was gathering round a 14 inch portable with a mini aerial hanging out the window) – and no Internet.

So, in a way that shocked and confused me, BT were really helpful and moved everything across from Old House without any fuss, problems or hassle. In fact, the day I moved into New House, I plugged the router in to see what would happen, and it only bloody worked. Yay, Internet!

And that’s the end of the story, the Internet worked and everything was great forever and ever.

Except, er, that’s not entirely true.

What had actually happened is that the delightful chap who lived in my house before me had done a runner in the night, without bothering to pay his rent or any of his bills. So the broadband that was hooked up wasn’t mine, it was his. BT being BT realised that there was already broadband in New House, didn’t bother to tell me, and cancelled the move, meaning I was paying for Internet in Old House. Lucky them.

It did mean that nobody was paying for my Internet, which BT have something of a problem with and decided to cancel the lot. Slightly understandable but then they decided not to let me know. Again.

Cue a hilarious phone call to one of their international call centres, which got me stuck into an infinite loop of:

“Your name doesn’t match the account holder’s name, so we can’t talk to you about this account”
“I know it doesn’t, that’s the reason I’m calling”
“We can only talk to the account holder”
“I don’t know where, or even who he is”
“You see, your name doesn’t match the account holder’s name, so we can’t talk to you about this account”
“I know…

until I got fed up and hung up while swearing at them for employing such utter retards .

Eventually, somehow, someway, I spoke to a wonderful person from wonderful England who understood what I was trying to say and promised that everything would be fine and everything would be sorted. And it almost was – Internet came back to New House, I started paying for Internet in New House and still paid for Internet in Old House.

Hang on. Yes, the useless, useless arseholes were double charging me. Months later when they finally acknowledged that maybe they shouldn’t be doing that, they sent me a cheque. To Old House.

9 months to get my money back. Nine frigging months. I hate you BT.