Tens of thousands of BT Broadband customers in Scotland, N. Ireland and the north of England have been without broadband yesterday and into today. What a palaver!
First of all the broadband was intermittent yesterday, then at 8pm last night it went off completely. Helplines were constantly engaged and by the time I did get through last thing, it transpired that there was a major problem and the remote robot suggested the caller phoned back in the morning. You can imagine the atmosphere in Dalamory……. and probably all over the land. This morning, I geared myself up and managed to get through. 32mins on hold, then another hour getting various advisers to sort it out.
What I noticed in particular was the conciliatory and sincere (also anxious) attitudes of all involved in helping to reset equipment. As I had agreed to a feedback session, it was just as well. However, I often have difficulties with accents and people who talk very fast – both on the telephone and the television, and that made things a bit more problematic.
On the whole I was satisfied with the service to reconnect the system, but it highlights yet again how precarious our social and business lives are nowadays. I just hope there is never a world-wide outage…. imagine what would or rather would not happen. Emails, business quotes, information of all kinds, medical consultations online (fast becoming essential in rural Scotland,) online shopping, (I was ordering HBTW’s birthday present on amazon yesterday,) Banking, Local Authority communications and so forth.
After all the excitement I needed a snooze, so the afternoon has been very quiet. I almost hesitate to say how wonderful it is to have the internet operational again. It is a wonderful world of networking …….. when it works; and of course if it doesn’t – there’s no easy way to let people know.
Freda, you are right. If someone figured out how to stop internet usage worldwide, we would probably starve to death within a couple days. I have just now scared myself.
What if this life if, full of care we have no time to ………. wait for e-technology to come to our aid? Apologies to W H Davies (Leisure). Trust your blood pressure is back to normal thanks to the remote voices. Normal service has now been resumed I presume.
At least you got your feedback opportunity – we had a lovely young man tell us to reset our router, but no chance to report how clear and helpful – and humorous – he was. But I don’t like the way BT discriminates against Gmail – dumps it all in people’s spam unless they specifically tell it not to. 🙁
What worries me is all the things in the background that depend on the Internet for process and for which I depend for service. I have no idea what would happen if we had no Internet for days, but it would probably not be pretty.
So happy to have you back with us!
Aloha from Honolulu
Comfort Spiral
>