I first posted this in the, "Where is Steve?" thread. I reproduce it here for the entertainment of all.
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Once Upon A Time, there was World Without the Internet.
They were happy, simple times. Children played in the street. Men wore suits when they sat down for tea (or 'dinner' in posh houses). TV was black and white, and consisted of one or two channels if you lived in the UK
Then came the home computer.
Then came The Internet. Initially, contact with The Internet was intermittent, faulty and expensive. The Most Common Provider was AOL. Here in the UK, contact with The Internet via AOL cost £0.01 per minute. A web page took about 5 minutes to download.
This was Miraculous. Granted, we clicked on a link and went off to make a meal, have a sleep, write a computer operating system etc, but eventually The Page appeared.
AOL was A Miraculous Internet Service Provide (ISP). Gradually, ISP's proliferated and offered Better Deals.
At the point that Broadband appeared in the UK, Freeserve were offering the best deal that I could find. All was well with the world. A touch slow, granted, but I did not actually
require much - just the occasional email and access to my banking website.
Then came The Mighty Broadband. Not to me, of course, because I live in the Middle of Nowhere and do not expect Services. Having said that, Broadband was Promised.
After Many a False Dawn, The Great And Mighty Broadband arrived in my particular Middle of Nowhere.
At the exact moment that Freeserve were bought by Wanadoo. These comedians immediately distributed their 'Live Home' box to their 'Valued Customers' (this is a
very familiar term).
It didn't work. Wanadoo's 'Technical Help' quickly achieved the status of 'Technical Helplessness'. 'Wanadoo' rapidly became known as 'Wanadont'. I bought a Netgear router and sorted thingies out in double quick time. This was in about 2004.
About 3 years later, I lost contact with my internet. Wanadont had been bought out by Orange by then, so I phoned the tech support number that I had left over from my Freeserve days and eventually got through to Orange tech support.
At least they spoke English. They were useless, but at least spoke English. When they pointed out that I was not using their Live Home router there was nothing they could do, they did at least tell me to contact Netgear.
Which took a Bit Of Doing. After all, the only way to get in touch with Netgear tech supp was to go onto the net and contact them, but my internet wasn't working. I eventually found a phone number and spoke to a tech supp (I am going to adopt 'ts' from now on) who told me that my antiquated router needed a fix that could be downloaded from the Netgaer site.
Which I could not access because my internet was down. Ok, so just being picky here. Even then, I had the occasional contact with access to the net........ Hey, at least the ts bod spoke English.
Up and running again, and all well until 4.45 am on Friday. Zilch movement on my trading accounts (yeah, I awoke early and decided to do some work) and 'no connection' showing on all of them.
In actuality, there have been a couple of other episodes that I have not described, and that I have solved using my own resources and experimentation and that I documented as I went along, so I had backup plans in place.
After several hours, it was clear that these were not going to work, so I looked up that old ts number and phoned it.
To find that ts has been moved offshore to find that the operative's command of English is limited.
Ok guys, bear in mind that this is Orange. Orange is a major international network. Orange is entirely responsible for what happened subsequently.
I rarely understood a word of what the ts guys/gals said to me. I quickly got into the habit of cutting the connection the instant I was answered by incomprehensible speech the instant the phone was answered. Seems cruel, I know, but you have to talk to these people to understand. I do not care that I was equally incomprehensible to them; I am the customer and require someone to understand
me.
You will not believe the hoops I was put through - including the claim that there is a fault on my line and that 'An error has been raised with BT genius' and that 'I can expect a call with an update report between......." Needless to say, said call never materialised. And who the Hell is BT genius? Don't answer - I do not actually care.
After battering away at this for what seems like an entire lifetime but was actually only 4 days, I was finally referred to 'The Fault Management Team"
Who turned out to be based in Rotherham, UK, about 20 miles up the road from me. And spoke English. And understood English. An ran through the diagnostic tests in about 20 minutes that the previous 'team' had failed to run through, or had run through repeatedly, in the previous 4 days.
Including a phone line test. The guy even had me unscrewing my fixed phone connection to look for something that turned out to be far to modern for my antiquated stuff. And finally accepted that yes, my machines are indeed connecting to the router (forgot to mention this earlier) but that the router is not connecting to the server.
Which is what I was telling those pillocks at ts on Friday.
Nothing the guy could do would work, so in the end he concluded that my aged router must be past its sell-by date and ordered another. If this does not work, then I will need a Visit From A Technician. Said router will arrive within 3-5 working days.
So, why am I online now and able to post this (a mere 4 days after the fault appeared and long before the new router is due to turn up)?
Well, I remembered the isp address that the ts guys kept telling me to use to call up the Netgear homepage to access all the settings. Remember the Netgear fix that I downloaded several eons ago? I had already tried using the Netgear homepage 'Restore to factory settings' but had already added the fix. This time, I tried a factory restore without adding the fix.
And hey presto, here we are.
Fucking hell fire and damnation and buckets of blood and I want all useless ts people to die.
And remember all of this was caused by Orange. That is the network to avoid at all costs.
Orange.
Their ts support people do not speak English.
Hehe. I had no idea this was going to turn into such a rant when I started. Tomorrow, I shall move it to its own thread in the rant forum.
In the meantime, should you be considering opening an internet service with Orange then don't. They are useless.
That is Orange. Do not sign up for Orange internet services if your language is English. You will get nothing from ts that you cannot do for yourself.
Later update: to give them their due, Orange's new router actually arrived by courier the following day. I do not need it, but it is safely tucked away for when I do. Right now, I am working on an, "It aint bust, so I aint fixing it" basis.
On Friday, my answering machine picked up a call from Orange Lack of Technical Support noting that I am making contact with their servers and asking if I am satisfied with their service. The caller spoke English, but the reply number is that same blasted number that leads me to the offshore call centre, where I would doubtless have to answer 15 more security questions before failing to get through to anyone with a firing brain cell.
I did not respond.
Remember guys, that is Orange. Use their 'service' at your peril.
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