So after the post titled Why Do People Lie, I continued to phone Virgin to chase them and on my final call of the day I got put through to the installation manager for our area, although he was actually quite possibly the tea boy in the office.
He gave me some story that the first guy should have done the cabling inside the house and left the outside part for another crew: Contrary to the engineers comments that if he did the work he would have to mark the install as completed hence making it very difficult to get someone out to finish the job.
Regardless, he told me that it should be possible to get a two man crew for Thursday at my request as Saturday we are out and Friday I am in Birmingham with work and I want to be here for the install to make sure they don’t cock anything up. The guy promised me a call first thing today on my mobile but he took my home number too in-case he couldn’t get hold of me.
It’s a good job I didn’t really hold my breath because they didn’t call – My mobile or the home phone. I got home about 7pm from work out in London today and upon my return I swifty called Virgin to have a moan and the person I spoke to told me he would raise a complaint against the install team – This sounded like progress until I heard the backward step: A complaint can take up to 72hrs for someone to action it which means three days before someone will even pick up the phone and call us to say were a stupid bunch of arses who can’t even manage to pull a fibre optic cable through the ground which we will then traffic manage and traffic shape beyond all control because we also lie about only controlling the traffic for the top 5% of the networks traffic – More like 50% from what I read.
Hang on – I need to say this again just because it doesn’t make sense. You schedule an install for Tuesday which you already knew needed two men because someone came here on Saturday to survey the house but still sent one and then I call repeatedly and get told that I will need to wait 72hrs – Which excluding Sunday as they will all be in church or something will take us to Monday. Figure?
Virgin are in the unfortunate position that my switch here has a port mirroring feature which means I can mirror the port which heads out to the router and Wireshark trace every single packet going in and out of the router so I will be able to see exactly how much traffic we are using not to mention the router activity logs although these will probably be poor until I get the router I really want. If I am in any kind of doubt as to the traffic management on our connection, I won’t think twice about calling Virgin technical support and explaining to them exactly how many packets we are sending out of our pipe and proving with to shadow of doubt that we are outside of the top 5% and will be the most stubborn arse customer they have ever encountered unless I feel I am receiving the speed we are paying for, and making Virgin technical support realise that the script they read from and the total lack of training they receive no doubt as all helpdesks of this ilk are culprits of will do them no good.
I might as well just demand two 20MB pipes for the price of one now and load balance them huh?