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March 20, 2005
The State Transition Game Part II
Ahhhh, moving house - nothing like it to consume money, patience and good will in roughly equal measures! Well, we're finally pretty much settled back in Melbourne again, minus some delayable tasks like changing over vehicle registration and the like.
Two memorable moments (for entirely the wrong reason):
(1) The person delivering our furniture moving his arrival time a full 12 hours over the course of the day, via updates every 1-2 hours. That's right, instead of having the cajones to 'fess up to some poor time and/or resource management somewhere along the line, we were shunted no less than 5 time during the day. Normally this wouldn't worry me unduly, but in this case my heavily pregnant girlfriend and I were waiting in an empty house for the entire day with nowhere for her to sit down.
Infinitely preferable would have been a call in the morning to say that he would be there late in the evening so we could either (a) make much better use our time during the day or (b) spend the night elsewhere rather than waiting for the load-in to finish at 12:30am!
Still, at least I was getting constant notification that the deadlines were slipping, which I cannot say for my old buddy Telstra Bigpond...
(2) Because of the nature of my work, I tend to move around a bit and, as a result, have had 4 separate ADSL installations (including this one just gone). And although Bigpond have never once managed to get the installation done on the day originally stated, I was somehow lulled into the belief that this time would be different.
So I was genuinely surprised when the due date rolled past and my ADSL modem was green-and-blinking rather than green-and-solid. The usual 10 minutes spent waiting on hold and the chirpy service person spoke to the connections team and informed me that my ADSL connection had in fact... not been connected, but there was no-one around who could explain why.
The next day (plus 10 minutes for the waiting again) and I found out that there had been a large number of connections at my exchange and everyone was working overtime to get them done (obviously not the previous night when I rang though :-)) and they would definitely have it connected that night... or the night after.
Now gullible I may be, but I can hear taste the urine amongst the sugar like the next guy, so this time I wasn't at all surprised when the next night rolled around and I was still green-and-blinking but thankfully I stopped blinking sometime the next day.
I'm guessing Mr Bigpond was sick the day they taught Customer Service at Deregulated Telecommunications school.
Posted by Andy Marks at March 20, 2005 09:16 PM
Comments
Ah, Hellstra... and this is the service they give the public when the public still owns 51% of them. :)
More seriously, just wait until you find out that, due to the large number of connections put in recently, there aren't any more available ports at the exchange, and you (the only one not connected!) have to wait until they put in a DSLAM in your area so that they can get more ports. Of, and of course the reason for the sudden demand is that they just put one in, so your area is going to be down on the totem pole for a new one...
Posted by: Robert at March 20, 2005 11:31 PM
Did I ever tell you about the time DoDo took 3 Months (on a 3 Month minimum term!) to connect my ADSL, finally managing to get it done the week I moved out... and *then* tried refusing to give my money back?
Posted by: Perryn Fowler at March 22, 2005 04:07 AM
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