Incompetent Swine

I hope it isn't true that troubles usually come in threes because the last few weeks have been utter hell and I was looking forward to a peaceful Christmas.

The first horror involved networking a company:

• The normally very reliable Dell was told to format a new server to Raid 1 standards. They didn’t and this was only apparent after half a day was spent setting the server up. Everything had to be wiped & the disk reformatted
• The always vile BT assured us that the ASDL connection was set up and that any fault was down to incorrect settings in the router. After another half day of screaming at Netgear and changing every conceivable setting, we discovered that in fact BT had lied and that broadband had not been activated.
• Once connected, all email to other branches started to bounce. After more musak and more screaming, it turned out that BT has a secret policy of rejecting anything sent through their servers unless the sender’s domain is registered with them. It took 24 hours for them to register the domain.
• The boss’s machine had Windows XP Home Edition … and, therefore, couldn’t be added to the domain without being upgraded. After that, his ancient copy of Office wouldn’t work. Reinstalling this proved more than a mite difficult as the original disks were missing.
• Finally, despite surge protection, a power cut wiped out all the router settings. So on the one day I was supposed to be elsewhere, all had to be cancelled so that I could set them up again.

Horror number two was trying to get O2 to set up GPRS on my brand new XDA II ... something the nice man in the Salisbury O2 shop said would only take an hour or so. In fact, it took them two weeks and involved me wasting hours of time talking to completely useless support staff, some of whom didn't seem to know what GPRS was.

On my first call I was told that it would take 2 hours to set up; on my second, 4 hours. Then I was told to wait 24 hours & then another 48. Finally a really charming lady said that it would definitely be running by the 26th November. In fact, it eventually starting working on the 27th, over two weeks since I bought the bloody phone.

I suggest that BT & O2 add an option to their phone menu:
Press 7 to detonate a small nuclear device under our support centre.