I was having a lovely time adding to my basket on Temu but my internet is fucked so I thought I might as well write instead. Although I’m on Talk Talk of course it all boils down to good old BT in the end. Doesn’t it always?! That good old bastion of British telecommunications.
So our telegraph pole has a big red mark on it. It has for the three years I’ve lived here. A BT engineer shed light on this a couple of years back. It’s condemned. It’s done it’s time. It needs to go. It’s bending. It’s covered in tree branches affecting the lines. It’s fucked.
Me and my neighbours got a letter around the Summer of 2021. They were coming to change the pole and we’d be offline for the day. Nice one. We didn’t mind so long as we finally got some decent internet.
At this point I’d like to mention that I tried my hardest to bring Virgin from my old house but there was this wasp’s nest apparently so all these grown men couldn’t connect me. No surprise there then.
Anyway, of course nothing happens. We knew this. We’d laid bets. Fast forward to March this year and this little wooden post with a sign on it appears over night informing us of a new BT pole that is to be fitted in the next few weeks.
Oh how we laughed.
I even emailed the company for further details and a very nice man came out to my house and personally told me it would be happening very, very soon. Awesome. We heartily laughed a bit more.
There was hope. Men came with instruments and fucked about. Measured things. Stared up at the pole. Adjusted heir testicles. Talked bollocks very loudly like only they existed. Probably getting paid about 40 quid an hour to do fuck all. One day three of them even sat on the grass directly opposite my window where they could see straight in and drank their tea and ate their butties. The dogs were going ballistic. I just hexed the motherfuckers from the kitchen.
Six months later the little wooden post no longer has a sign stuck to it. It has been pissed on by my dogs, torrentially rained on as it’s British Summer time and flapped about in the wind nearly every day. It has flown off to land on some other poor fucker’s prehistoric BT line.
I’ve spent hours copying and pasting the same query on Talk Talk customer chat until today when I gave up and ordered Virgin again. I’ve written a letter of complaint and posted an actual snail mail letter to Talk Talk. I’ve also started a case on Resolver. The poor customer service people don’t know how to deal with this. It’s out of their hands. A random BT pole is not on their script. No one knows what you’re talking about. No one has a clue. Nothing is logged. It’s Talk Talk buying line from BT. It’s one man to fill the kettle, another to light the gas and a third to put the kettle on the hob. In different houses, in different decades on different planets. It’s like the Egyptian airport I went to that was staffed only by men. A riot of confusion and stupidity. Lot’s of men stirring the pot and not a lot happening. Nothing getting done. Drawing in the money. Chaos and confusion.
But we aren’t all fuckwits.