The gravy train has pulled in to the station, employer funded broadband will end, financial tightness has them by the goolies. Everyone was very polite about it, but still I was given two and a bit months to find a new ISP. The good news is that it gives me an incentive to finally be rid of BigPond, Australia’s least favourite ISP — or maybe its just the devil you know, you only ever hear bad things about the one you’re with.
Having rebuilt my home PC and started the laborious job of reinstallation and reconfiguration, I thought I’d better check with BigPond to see how many megabytes the patches and updates had cost me. A simple task? Of course not. Nothing is ever simple or easy with BigPond, nothing other than being billed that is. Splat across the homepage of http://my.bigpond.com is the following, in place of the dialog boxes that are supposed to let me login:
Hmm, its been two months now, surely BigPond have made some sort of progress on my problems with their billing system… surely…
Interactive telephone games, 133.933, 1, 1, 1, 2, 03, home phone number, #, yes, yes, yes… Aha, a human.“What can I do for you today?”
“I lodged a problem report on August the 8th, called again on the 10th and 14th, then had it escalated on August the 21st.
A Telstra BigPond technician — presumably of the second level in support — telephoned to see if my problem with their billing system has been resolved. A short answer: No, since they have not yet resolved it!
Interesting in that I was told last Tuesday they would contact me in “about four to five days”, with the implication that it would be fixed by then, but the first contact is in six days and that is pretty obviously just to verify that they have to start working on the problem!
Ho hum, on it goes…
Three weeks, one problem, four phone calls, nine emails — today I spent 45 minutes on the phone and they reproduced the problem I first reported on the 8th, then again on the 10th, and will escalate it to a higher level of support!
The woman in support that I spoke to was very helpful, she expressed complete amazement that nothing has been done in three weeks and confirmed that the unpublished “wide-spread login problems” on a Friday afternoon two weeks ago was a typical “go away and stop bothering me” answer.
Customer support my ass!
Second round of the BigPond battle. Between lunch time and now I’ve exchanged six emails with the BigPond help staff and gone over the same ground — I can login to http://my.bigpond.com/, I can see my bill, but I cannot email my bill to myself. Once again the email query has reached an impasse and I have to telephone 13xxxxxx whatever and play the interactive menu games.
No bill for August, then I can’t send myself one by email, then support like this!
Yay Telstra (again). Since their account management system is incapable of handling my work address, I have to have my bills emailed to me. Due to “security reasons” they have to be emailed to my BigPond account and I cannot have them emailed to any other address. (Note, I can have the physical bill mailed to any address).
Aarg! On Tuesday I rang them up and was promised a return phone call within an hour or two, on Wednesday I lodged the same enquiry via email and was promised a response within 24 hours, then today, 48hours later I get an email telling me stuff all, and that I should call them on the phone!
Four paragraphs of advertising for their incredibly expensive 3G wireless network service and then:
I’m starting to think that getting Microsoft Vista on the new laptop was a mistake… It seems so slow! I know darned well it isn’t the hardware…
Oh, and then there’s the “service” from Telstra BigPond… It seems that despite Vista having been available in development for almost two years and publicly available for two months, they don’t support it yet, or not in any information on their websites!
After half an hour yesterday of poking around with various wireless connection panels on Vista I gave up and plugged a piece of UTP in and set up a wired connection, then tried calling the technical support to ask how to get the wireless laptop to talk to the wireless router across less than a metre of desk space.
Absolutely amazing! After just over a month of the BigPond usage meter not working, when I checked it today it has miraculously come back to life. Still no mention that it is broken, the best I get was a confused verbal message when I rang up half way through November when I was told that some of the usage meters are incorrect for some of the accounts.
Almost half an hour on the phone to BigPond/Telstra trying (unsuccessfully) to change the billing address for my broadband connection to go to Monash.
The online form has a number of small, fixed-length fields and no conceivable abbreviation of Rm 232, Bldg 28, ITS Division, Monash University, Wellington Rd, Clayton 3800, Vic. can be made to fit in the small, fixed length fields.
The BigPond telephone staff tried, but finally admitted that they too were confronted by “the new billing system” with its small, fixed-length fields and could not change the address.
The Telstra BigPond package turned up at home this morning, it contains one “insert and run” Microsoft Windows CD and one PCMCIA wireless card as well as the ADSL modem and Ethernet cable.
I had carefully told the nice man with the almost unintelligible Indian accent that I needed the wireless card for a DESKTOP PC and that both PCs ran Linux and not Windows. So I’ve been given a CD I can’t run and a wireless card I can’t plug in!
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
