Respect Sakura

Hello there! You might remember me from when I used to write blog posts for Respect Sakura so very, very long ago. Okay, so maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole here and there, but it has been over a month that I’ve been waiting for my internet connection to come into fruition. What happened? Well, here in Australia, our telecommunications industry sucks ass. Essentially, we have an ex-government approved monopoly known as Telstra, and we have a few slightly smaller companies like Optus who compete against them.

Now, you can’t spit in Australia without it landing on someone who has all manner of bad things to say about Telstra, so you’d expect that the best way to compete against them would be to have a company that doesn’t follow Telstra’s guidelines on dealing with customers, and actually provide a good service, be easily contactable, and will bend over backwards to help you with enquiries or issues you may have. Right? Right? Well, unfortunately it appears that Optus are so smitten with the notion of doing everything better than Telstra, that they’ve gone out of their way to not only emulate Telstra’s wonderful customer relation policies, but take them to the next level of ungodly asshole-ness.

So I get my phone and internet service through Optus. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the phone - it’s purely there for the internet service. I arrange to get them transferred to the new place, and with Optus being such absolute pillocks, I prepare myself for the fact that the internet connection may lag behind the phone connection. I’ll be moving on the weekend, so I tell them to disconnect my service on the Saturday. What do they do? The second that 11:59PM, on a Friday night, rolls around - fucking BAM! Phone line and internet service is dead. Okay, so I was hoping that Saturday would mean, like.. that Saturday night, or sometime during Saturday, and not when I’m spending my last few hours playing WOW on the Friday night. So the precision of “Saturday” was most unexpected, but hey.. if they’re that picky about this, then maybe I’ll be fine in regards to the phone and internet getting hooked up. Right?

Sure enough.. the Tuesday I specified as the date to get it put on rolls around, and they connect the phone line up. I’m a little alarmed, because my DSL modem reports that there’s no DSL synchronization whatsoever, but hey.. maybe that comes later. A week rolls past, and I’m wondering what’s taking Optus so long with my internet connection. I ring them to find out. A few hours later, I get on to somebody, give the pertinent information, and they draw a blank. They can’t find any records, or they do find records stating I disconnected my service back in some arbitary month, last year. Kind of odd, seeing as I was using and paying for it still, just a bit over a week ago. To cut a long story short, they seemed to completely lose all record of me ever wanting to transfer my internet service, and probably did so because I was so insistant that I’d keep my original bandwidth limits, and not this bullshit “10GB flat with uploads included” plan they were going to slap me on.

Fair enough. Maybe this is a good opportunity to go with those awesome plans TPG have at their disposal. I inform Optus very politely that they can go fuck themselves, and immediately get in contact with TPG. TPG tell me they’ll have me connected within the week. Sure enough, a week later - I get an e-mail whilst at work, stating the work on the line has been done, and when I get home, I’ll have lovely, lovely internets at ADSL2 speeds, and with TPG’s significantly higher bandwidth limits (100GB a month, and only shaping down to 256k when I go over).

Thing is, when I get home - not only is there no internet, there’s no more goddamn phoneline. In fact, when I try calling my number - some guy named Tom picks up the line, and tells me his phone number is nothing like mine. Awesome. I wait until the next day to promptly call TPG, and inform them of what went down. They play the “Oh, it’s a problem with your phone line, call your line provider” game, obviously not wanting to own up to the fact that whoever “connected” the line obviously had a case of the passion fingers. Fuck it, then.. I’ll give Optus a call. An hour of waiting on the phone with Optus later, and I get on to somebody. They then inform me that

1. I have to wait a week or two.
2. That I will most likely have to pay for the tech to come out.

Naturally, this has me seething with rage. After this, I make two more calls. The first, is to the TIO with a complaint against Optus’s behaviour, and a statement that I want them to fix it by today or the next business day, and to not charge me a contract cancellation fee when I change providers, as they have routinely failed to provide me service, or actually do what I request of them (the internet transfer, for example). The next call is to Telstra, to get my phone line ported back to them. This all happened on Friday of last week.

Monday afternoon, as I’m coming home - I get a call. There’s going to be a Telstra technician waiting for me when I get home to re-install my phone line and internet service. So, there’s something to be learned in all of this. When your ISP or telco try to pull some kind of bullshit on you, demand proper service from them. When they come up with a bullshit excuse as to why they won’t, take it to the TIO. Be sure to post all about it on places like Whirlpool, as well or do your best to make your ordeal as public as possible (ie, this blog post). Morale of the story is that when your ISP or telco hands you a pile of shit - you don’t have to take it.