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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.

That changes the whole game. Since the old monopoly now pretends to be broken up, and those who thought of it as a safe place to stay are now being told they're part of a competitive picture, you can't just apply a technical fix by choosing another supplier. When it comes to telecoms supply, it's more a case of the supplier picking you - no matter the cabling operation covering your area, that's whose van is going to turn up outside your door. The whole point of the "last mile" concept is that any backbone or bandwidth seller can engage and deliver via any copper provider, which is supposed to help with cutting costs, but what it actually does is cut the chain of responsibility, from the guy who takes your order to the guy who turns up to do the work. None of it is anyone's problem now. Except yours, that is.

The fix I've found is entirely human. Learn a bit of BT jargon and figure out what they mean by a pair (it isn't quite what we mean by a twisted pair, a la Ethernet), discover what kind of tea they drink, make sure you have a parking space for their van, treat them as you'd love to be treated in their shoes. Tell them you'll keep their little secrets about what works, what's broken and what they trod on when coming out of their stripey tent. Personalise the contact to compensate for the merciless way that their paymasters have depersonalised their job. It shouldn't have to be like this, you say, and I do rather agree with that conclusion. I can remember when BT men took real pride in the way they kept companies going, and I lay blame for its subsequent deterioration on every level of the organisation we're left with, not just on the poor bloody infantry. It's just not good enough.

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