Unfiltered Story #269485

A few years ago I decided I’d switch ISP while moving, since it would wind up saving me a bit of money. So I called the new ISP, gave them my moving date, they sent me a router, and when I move in on a Saturday, I test it out and the internet won’t connect. After a bit of troubleshooting, I call their helpline, they do some more testing and agree to send out a technician and give me some free mobile data to carry me over.

The technician arrives Monday morning while I’m at work and figures out there’s nothing wrong with the lines outside the property but because I wasn’t home, he couldn’t check inside the property so I have the schedule a new appointment with a technician when I’ll be home so they can get things sorted.

And this is where things get fun.

I call the ISP on Monday night and tell them that I’ll be home Tuesday afternoon or all day Wednesday and they agree to schedule the technician for Tuesday afternoon.

Tuesday comes and there’s no sign of any technician. In the evening, the ISP calls me again and act as if the phone call the previous night never happened. They ask me when I’ll be home, I tell them all day Wednesday and they enter that into their system to schedule a technician.

Wednesday. No technician again. I figure maybe they’re just busy and I still have enough mobile data to last me for a bit longer.

Thursday. I go to work and come home and there’s still no sign any technician has been. So I decide to start trying to figure out what’s going on.

I log into the ISP’s website and find where I can check the progress of my helpline ticket. From what I can understand, they scheduled the technician when I first called and they arrived on the Monday. So far so good. Then the ticket says nothing happened until Thursday morning when they did something that I couldn’t figure out at the time but figured it out later. So I log into their online help chat (Since I was sick of sitting on hold every time I called them at this point) and use that to try figure out what’s happening. They tell me that the technicians work for a separate company and give me the job number their system uses and the phone number to contact them.

So I call this new phone number and things get weirder. First, it asks me which region I live in and none of the regions are actually where I live. I figure this is kinda weird but okay, I live in one of the smaller regions and maybe we somehow just got missed. I don’t pick any options and get through to an actually helpful call centre operator who lets me know that while that company, [Company A] deals with the phone lines for most of the country, [Company B] actually deals with the phone lines in my area and the ISP gave me the wrong number. Luckily, the call centre employee was very helpful and gave me the correct number.

So I call that number and I finally start getting some answers.

It turns out, the ISP had done basically nothing either of the times I called them and at [Company B]’s end, the job automatically lapses after 72 hours. That’s what had happened at 7:30 that morning; the job had automatically lapsed. So the woman I spoke to at [Company B] tells me I need to call the ISP again and get them to actually reschedule the technician visit.

So I call the ISP once again and sit on hold again. They tell me that they’ll try to reschedule the technician visit again but I need to call [Company B] again and give me [Company A]’s phone number, despite that being the wrong company.

But I push forward and call [Company B] once again and get the same woman again who is starting to get as frustrated as me. She informs me that it isn’t my job to call [Company B], it was never my job to call [Company B] and the ISP should never have told me to call them. She also says that the ISP have still not requested a technician visit and sent a job order through to them so there’s nothing she can do until they do that.

So yet again, I call the ISP. I tell them everything that the woman at [Company B] has told me, and kinda shrug it off and tell me that they’ll absolutely definitely schedule the technician visit and to keep my mobile phone on me so that they can set the appointment times and [Company A] will let me know when the technician is being sent out. Excellent, I think! It’s finally almost over.

But no. About an hour later, I get a phone call from the ISP asking if my internet is working yet. I’m pretty sure they can’t have actually done anything to fix it since no technician had magically appeared in my house, but I double check but no, still no work. So once again, they tell me to call [Company A] and again, give me the wrong phone number because again, [Company B] is the company that actually handles phone lines in my area. I repeat to them that I was told I’m not supposed to be contacting [Company B] directly but the ISP employee insists it’ll work this time.

So I try calling [Company B] and thankfully, get the same woman who is definitely getting as frustrated as me. She tells me that there still isn’t any job opened at her end so she still can’t help me, and that I’ll once again have to contact the ISP. But then she comes up with a better idea.

She decides to call the ISP herself and makes it a conference call so I get to listen in as she berates them for being useless and giving me bad information. The ISP employee tries telling her that it says on my file that I was told to call [Company B] and she points out that that I should never have been told that because it’s not my responsibility.

Eventually, we figure out the problem. Because the ISP deals directly with [Company A], and [Company A] contracts out the relevant jobs to [Company B], [Company A] was the problem. So they were patched in on the call too and finally gave the extremely helpful woman the information she needed to finally be able to set up sending out a technician.

On Friday, the technician arrived, found a relatively minor fault in the wiring in my house and at last, my internet was connected after a very long week with far, far too much hold music.