Can Telstra get any worse?

Insh'alllah, no.

A wise comment on a recent post suggested I should keep from venting my spleen until it was really needed.  The time has come.

I blogged about Telstra's network service a few days ago but despite that experience (and similar events reported by others) decided to use their wireless system to enable me to get internet access when travelling around the countryside.

So I got a prepaid wifi hotspot device from the Queanbeyan store.  This was a relatively painless process.  After checking the package I decided not to activate it that day and have been a bit busy since.  So today was the day.

I followed instructions to activate on line (very bureaucratic and detailed) and got a nice email saying it was all happening and in 4 hours they'd send me another message confirming that I was good to go.  About 6 hours later I hadn't got the message so I checked the task tracking number offered.  Oh oh: there is a problem: ring some number or another.

I did this and after a lot of annoying stuff got to speak to some fleshware.  He said the problem had arisen on 16 April rater than today 20 April I became a little annoyed as that could only be some stuff up by their Queanbeyan store.  When he got to saying that I had two choices:
  1. go and get another SIM card; or 
  2. wait up to 5 days to "remediate" the problem 
I plotzed (fair dos, Arabic to begin with, Yiddish here).  In fact the linguistics gets a tad complicated as, while Yiddish is based on Old German, I used some short Old English - ie Anglo Saxon - words.  I then asked to speak to his supervisor.

Apparently the supervisor was busy and could do no more than confirm those two options.  There was no more foreign talk but quiet politeness - which people who know me well realise is the time to move well out of range of the upcoming explosion.  Suddenly the supervisor became available and offered me 5 extra Mb of data to compensate for the inconvenience of option 1.  They would call me back at 6pm  (my suggested timing) to do the activation business.

It is now 6:15pm and the phone hasn't rung.  Do these people have any idea how to run a business?  By 6:45 the phone still hadn't rung so I called them.  Needless to say the voice activated direction system was a farce but after 20 minutes or so I ended up talking a young-sounding female who

  1. explained that the problem was that the guys in the shop tried to activate the device but that process got interrupted by a systems upgrade, and then
  2. actually managed to get me connected (and acknowledged the compensation deal offered previously). 
The call took, in total, 37 minutes.  Now we come to the two crucial tests:

  • Will the bloody thing work at Jerilderie tomorrow night? and
  • Will we also be able to connect Frances' iPad to the system. (anywhere)?
Given that I found one competent person in the Telstra operation one must assume that the answer to my opening question must be 'Yes' since they may find that a member of staff has actually been helpful and fire her!

Comments

Peter Quinton said…
Good luck :). The Telstra wireless service actually works well once it fires up - hope it works out.
20 April 2014 at 21:49:00 GMT+10
Flabmeister said…
Thanks Peter. I suspect the main problem is that Telstra management are totally focused on NBN so anything else gets minimal support.

Martin
21 April 2014 at 05:25:00 GMT+10
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