Wednesday 25 November 2015

Skyfall II - Skyfail

You'll remember I had a slight problemette with almost the entire workforce of Sky a couple of weeks ago. Well they've struck again, only more inconveniently, more ineptly and more absurdly.

After they had failed to call me back to arrange for an engineer to reconnect my broadband to my television I had left it for a few weeks. I was too blazing angry to contact them again for a while. I decided I could live without the last two epsiodes of Banshee and 83 series of The West Wing for the time being. By the way how hard can it be to send the right engineer? Why does there have to even be a 'right engineer', why won't 'an engineer' suffice? All these and maybe more questions may never be answered.

So anyway I got home from work on Wednesday night to another spectacular surprise from everyone's favourite evil media empire. I would say it had been a bad day at work but I don't use that term any more. There are no bad days at work, because that would imply that there are some good days. There is now no longer any expectation that a day in work can be anything other than bad, so it was just another day in work. As I rolled through the door, trying not to let the suddenly adventurous cat out, Emma handed me a card with a 'sorry we missed you' note on it. This is the kind of thing that normally arrives when she has had something delivered. Two bags of shite for the price of one, as I always say. Not this time. This time it was from Sky, who were sorry they had missed me when they had come around to sort out my small broadband problem. So small is it, in fact, that their achievement in turning it into a colossal, unsolvable mind-bender is worthy of some praise. As is the fact that they tried to fix it by turning up without telling me. I'm genuinely in awe of their staggering incompetence.

I had no idea. Their failure to call me back after our last furious row had, as far as I was aware, left the situation in limbo. I was taking time out from speaking to them to calm down, and to contemplate whether I would rather give my money to that bogus man of the people Richard Branson than to that blatant man of himself Rupert Murdoch. The note advised that I would need to contact them to make another appointment but brilliantly, in the way that only Sky seem to know how, it complicated this by not including a number on which to contact them. I had to Google that number, using my Sky broadband. It is easy to see how they have become so powerful.

At first I thought it was going to go smoothly. The usual 8-minute wait to speak to someone did not materialise and I was put straight through to someone. I say straight through, you do have to spend a couple of minutes talking to a machine which has the effect of making anyone within earshot think you are just shouting random words down the phone like some kind of berserk biff. The first person I spoke to (there were five) asked how they could help me and this is where I made my fatal mistake. Instead of just saying that I would like to rearrange my engineer's visit, I added that I would like to complain about the shabby and ridiculous level of amateurish service on offer from Britain's biggest media empire and it's army of barely English-speaking Stormtroopers. But someone else has to deal with that, like the Good Morning Sir queue in that same episode of The Young Ones I referenced in my last rant at Sky's expense.

I don't really consider myself to be a bad tempered person. I don't really get angry. When someone pisses me off I tend to roll my eyes, tut and then write a furious blog about them. Mentioning no names of course. But when I have been put on hold for five minutes at a time and am awaiting another conversation with the fifth different Sky employee (who may or may not help me) it tends to raise my temperature. In the end I had some kind of psychotic break. The latest Sky minion had told me that she needed my mobile number to continue this discussion, for reasons that I absolutely cannot fathom still. Humouring her, I gave her my mobile number, answered when she called and then put down the land line receiver. At least I was no longer paying the call charge for this bullshit. Not that this had cooled me down any since she kept asking me the same questions over and over, questions that didn't seem relevant or to which the answers should have been readily available considering this was the 762nd time I had tried to fix this problem. It was like Room 101, with all my personal hells coming to visit me all at the same time. Abject torture. In the end I said;

'JUST SEND THE RIGHT FUCKING ENGINEER!'

And I did use those words, and some worse ones. She was just about to tell me that she would not be able to continue the call if I continued to use that language when I gave up. Emma had come into the room to find out what was going on and so I just handed her the phone and left the room. Emma is not known for her patience, but she is even less likely to shout 'just send the right fucking engineer' at anyone than she is to show patience. It took another 10 minutes of utter bullshit to come to something even resembling a solution Even then they could only tell her that they would send a text message to me at which point I would have to contact them again to make final arrangements for another appointment. As I write this, they have just this moment sent me the following text;

Thank you for contacting Sky with your recent enquiry. We have applied a resolution on to your account and believe the issue to now be resolved. Please check your bill at blah blah blah. Resolved is an interesting choice of word, I think. My definition of resolved would be for me to go home tonight and find that my On Demand service, for which I am paying a fucking fortune, is actually working. Which it won't be. This is not then, in any way, resolved. In short, this is not fucking over. Far from it.

I can only hope that when I do contact them to finally get this 'resolved', the first person I speak to offers me a plausible explanation as to how any of this happened, some money off my bill, and a solution to the problem without having to speak to 14 different people, each from a different country. Maybe its best if Emma does it....

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