Thursday, December 15, 2011

Hotmail Recovered

Those of you who were up all night worrying about my Hotmail can now rest easy. After a process so tedious and convoluted that only a large faceless organisation could come up with it, I have managed to get my account back.

The poster who pointed out that if you aren't paying then you are not really a customer in their eyes had it about right. (Although I don't know if their service is any better if you are paying). It is very easy to enthusiastically sign up for something, use it so much that it becomes essential and then when it crashes you are stuffed because you never asked yourself- "What happens when it goes wrong?"

I had a similar problem with Orange Broadband recently. I happily signed up to their cheap deal but the router didn't work properly and kept dropping the connection. When I tried to contact Orange, they put me through to technical support in Bombay (why do they call it Mumbai nowadays?) An Indian man who could only understand very basic English followed a script and drove me slowly up the wall. He cannot put you through to anybody in the UK and cannot help you either. Why should he care though- he is in Mumbai, he has told you that his name is "Kevin" and he knows that you will never get to speak to him again.

To cut a long and tedious story short, I was sent two more identical routers that dropped the connection equally regularly and reached about half of my house. I told them I wanted to move and was informed that I would have to pay a fee. I ignored this along with their subsequent demands and moved to Yorkshire based Plusnet. When I told their sales lady about my problems with Orange, she responded with "By 'eck!" and a couple of "tha"s, which I found most reassuring. I have been promised that I will never have to speak to anyone who does not know how to keep pigeons or make a strong cup of tea. Based on my experiences so far, I urge you to join me.

7 comments:

alex said...

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Dave said...

I had a similarly painful experience with Orange Broadband, but the outcome was surprisingly positive. I somehow managed to get through to someone in the UK (it took a *lot* of trying), who was clearly a back-office tech-y type, who didn't spend all day talking to moronic customers, and was therefore pleasant and helpful, and actually resolved my problem.

I called back to try and thank him and discovered that it had been his last day. He had also very kindly upgraded my service to unlimited, and - best of all - stopped the system from charging me any money. For the next 2 years I had free broadband until I moved - for all I know the current residents of the flat might still be benefiting from it :) I just wish I knew where that nice man was working now.

Anonymous said...

Haha love it, thank you for sharing.

Dave the poor man was probably sacked for being helpfull.
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xx

Anonymous said...

Similar deal here. I'd been with Freeserve, which later turned into Orange. I had extensive problems with their traffic shaping (taking a look at what you're sending and down-rating it accordingly).

What took the biscuit was when I phoned up with a problem with their service, had correctly identified the problem, and it took the phone answerer 40 minutes before he confessed that they had a problem (40 mins of me rebooting stuff at my end that had nothing to do with the problem).

I moved to Zen and haven't looked back since.

English Pensioner said...

I've been with PlusNet since I first had broadband and have never had any complaints. Their Thompson modem/router seems excellent, I've only re-booted it once in the past six months or so.

Anonymous said...

Does tha nose who owns that there Plusnet?

It's marketing genius as they are part of good old British Telecom (or whatever they are called this week).

Nothing wrong with their service but be aware that it is exactly the same as BT.

I know someone who moved from BT to Plusnet because of problems, the problems are still not resolved.

Conversely I know someone who moved and had their problems resolved.

Just wanted to let it be known that rather than racing pigeons against whippets and making lots of yorkshire pudding and parkin while not answering the phone, it is part of the faceless BT 'community' as they put it.

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