INTERNET PLEASE!

So I might have mentioned that British don’t ever seem to be in a hurry to do anything. My wonderful wife knows what is like. She wanted to go shopping one afternoon, but we didn’t get to the stores until 4pm, on a Saturday, and they were all closing in the next hour or so. Ordering utilities even worse, in the States people may complain about the phone company, the cable company, or the guy delivering their new washing machine. But in all honesty they don’t know how well they have it. The Brits only work Monday through Friday from maybe 9 am to 4 pm when it comes to deliveries or installations. So if you need to take time off of work to be there. And they like to have unbelievably complicated procedures so expect to have to deal with each company 3 or 4 times.

I know this because I am currently living through it. All I really wanted in my apartment in Portsmouth was internet. I really could care less about phone or TV services. So read through the websites and thought I had it figured out. I could order a DSL line from Sky. While I was at it I would go ahead and get cable (this was part of the packages of services I can expense). I could have ordered from BT (British Telecom) and got a phone line and a DSL line but it would cost more than the line from SKY and it would be slower. Well when I called sky up I found out I would need a phone line anyway. Just the 8 GBP line a month but I would need it anyway or they could install TV but not internet. Ok so I put the order on hold and called BT. Three days later I had a phone line. One week in the apartment down.

The next day I received a follow up call from Sky told them I had a phone line and they said they would schedule me for install, but the internet would not get activated until after the TV was active. Ok weird, but ok. Well the first appointment they had was a week and a half later! Ok there goes two more weeks. I take an hour off of work and let the guys install the TV feed. It actually went quite smooth. Then I began waiting. Supposedly I would get the router and internet that Wednesday. Well it didn’t happen. Ok I thought I will wait till the end of the week the mail could be slow. Another week down. Monday nothing came in the mail so I called Sky. ‘Oh did you want to sign up for internet’ she asked. I almost lost it at this point. ‘YES I WOULD LIKE INTERNET’ I said ‘how fast can we do this’. ‘We’ll have you all set up in 15 days’ she responded. WTF, after a month I have not had internet and now it’s going to be another two weeks.

So as I write this I still do not have internet in my apartment 5 weeks after trying to order it. What is more fun is that they can only deliver it I am home, if not I fill out a card then 2 days later I can pick it up at the post office. No kidding. So as if I wasn’t aggravated enough at this point I decided that the day I ordered, or should I say reordered internet, I thought it would be a good idea to pay the bill for the phone line I have had for no reason for the last month. So I went to the website, you can set up direct debit there if you have a UK bank, which I don’t. You can send a check through the mail if it is a UK bank, again I don’t have a UK bank (this is also fun with my rent). You can also pay with a card, but not over the internet and not over the web, you have to physically go to a post office.

So I went to the post office over lunch hour. Not a smart move, the line was out the door. But before I could even get that far I had to find a bank to get cash to pay for parking, because there is no parking at the post office. This took 20 minutes because the parking is several blocks from the bank, luckily I didn’t get ticketed while I went for money. So I waited in the que for 40 min finally to pay my bill with a credit card. None of my cards work because of the machines they use. My cards are legal tender in the UK but they only have machines that will read a smart chip embedded in the card. So luckily I had gone to the cash machine, I had literally a pound left over from my withdrawal between parking and paying the telephone bill. So next time I am in the states and I have to deal with the utility company and they give me a 5 hour window that they will be there, I will just be glad because at least the window was on a Saturday and they were able to do it the first week.