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Casual larceny

Posted on 16 Jun 2008 at 11:16

Steve Cassidy gets caught between bad people and good software, and laments the sad decline of a once-proud institution.

A selection of some of the tales of woe I've witnessed over the last year includes:

My connection being deliberately unhooked by BT workers at the exchange across the road, six times. Each time they claimed that the line - actually operated by Easynet under an LLU contract - was "undocumented", and that standard practice was to stick a wedge in it and wait for someone to complain. Six times?

A small business in South London being told that its third-party ISP had misconfigured the exchange equipment, in order to cover up a line fault that had started after 20 months of fault-free operation.

A BT engineer at a site installation in Bristol merrily saying: "I just need a few bits from the van..." and then driving away, never to return. The job was eventually completed by the faults department.

A leased-line connection, which had become subject to elevated levels of support, being described as "a bit worn in the box in the road" and hence prone to shorting out. Apparently, this was fixed with a few cable-ties carefully deployed in the roadside box.

I'm sure that everyone responsible for telecoms and networks in business will be familiar with BT's standard response to a fault. The light goes out on some box on the wall and by hook or by crook someone in the company finally manages to get through and report it. In comes the cheery repairman, who says something like: "Yes of course, there was no fault at all, but we checked everything over anyway and it's OK." The wilier among telecoms managers will be watching those lights on the box on the wall: at some point they'll flicker, and that's when the repair crew found the fault (the one they immediately claim doesn't exist).

Yes, I accept that this is the way of the whinger. Part of the reason BT's customer operators behave this way is that dealing with all sections of the public renders them heavily defensive, and every so often rather contemptuous, too. They are, after all, the backbone of the country and their services and sacrifice are frequently under-appreciated, if not by the customer then certainly by their managers. And if we computer techies think our users are occasionally dense, cunning and devious, then remember that at least most of our clients have to be able to read and write. BT has a somewhat wider customer catchment than that, and at the same time there's a great imbalance of karma at work. When your service specialists have to range all the way from a High Court judge's chambers to a crack-house in semi-derelict flats down a side-street off the nearby market, then of course they're likely to adopt a one-size-fits-all service model to cope.

But having a hard time excusing system failures to unsympathetic customers isn't a sufficient excuse for sloppy operations, repeated errors and evident laxity in almost everything they do. Two years ago, I was used to the idea that one could get into difficulties dealing with BT, possibly with one contact in five. Now, I expect to have trouble getting a satisfactory conclusion four times out of five. Deterioration on this scale casts a rather unflattering searchlight on BT's recent rash of adverts for its computer support services. Buy your helpline capability from people whose public-facing workers appear to rate economy with the truth above all other considerations? It beggars belief.

The first question that naturally arises from this rant is: what's changed recently to turn things so bad, so fast? It seems to me, looking purely from the perspective of a consumer, that the shift to OpenReach as a BT-branded provider of the "last mile" connection has clearly wrought huge internal damage to the staff morale. Old BT hands don't like helping to disassemble the once great monopoly by doing work on LLU lines - now technically "owned" by companies other than BT - and they display their reluctance in strange, sullen and disempowered ways. Your job as a network person is supposed to be technical, and therefore reasonably simple, but the crucial problem - and the reason I'm bringing this to your attention - is that it's a very unusual network these days that doesn't talk to the internet, and nowadays it's almost a dead cert that your small business LAN will be linked up via pieces of kit installed and maintained by OpenReach, no matter who you tried to buy service from.

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