The man on the phone, sitting in an office in the Indian subcontinent, is telling me I have a problem with bras. We’ve only just been introduced but I like him already.
Until this point, our conversation has verged on the turgid but it’s not Palindrome’s fault (his name, he tells me, is the same spelt backward as it is forwards, like Toot, although his name isn’t Toot).
It’s Palindrome’s stock in trade, namely the internet, specifically BT Broadband, which explains the dry, flakiness of the discussion.
Palindrome is doing his best to explain why my broadband connection is rubbish.
In turn, this will explain (I think) why I missed most of the first day of the Edgbaston Test. I get Sky through BT Vision, which is pumped into my telly via an internet feed.
If the internet feed keeps crapping out, the Sky falls in. I could almost hear the roars from Edgbaston in my back garden but thanks to BT I couldn’t see the action.
Neither could I work, without spitting teeth and shouting expletives, on my laptop. Something called a VPN connection, which I need for work, kept falling out, too – because the broadband kept crapping out. Everything was crapping out. It’s Crapping Out Central at our place.
My wife was unable to print rail tickets, to visit the seaside with our children, because the broadband was so slow it wouldn’t open PDF documents.
And our enjoyment of the BBC drama The Hour was trashed. We tried watching it on the telly on BBC iPlayer, via BT Vision. What naive fools.
Our late night cocoa went cold as we waited for the show to appear on the iPlayer menu, such was the sluggish service, and then the programme kept stopping and starting while something called buffering went on. To misquote soul singer Sam Cooke, I don’t know much about buffering, but I know this: it’s a dull spectator sport.
It took 25 minutes to watch six seconds of The Hour. We hit the “off” button.
I could go on but I think you’ve got the picture. My plight, I’m sure, isn’t unique. It may well be that you too have felt my pain.
But it’s not so much the bad service that gets me. It’s the empty gestures of customer service that infuriate.
When I first contacted the Blimey, My Broadband Connection’s Rubbish helpdesk, I was told there had been an “outage.” There was a “problem with cabling.” It would take two or three days to “stabilise” and possibly a week to get the broadband up to speed.
I would be called in a few days, to see how it was going. A supervisor also spoke to me, to see if I was happy with what the first person had just told me.
Of course, I didn’t get a call. I waited. It never came. I hit the computer. I used Twitter to express my frustration and a beacon of light shone in the micro-smogosphere courtesy of @BTCare, which asked me to complete a “webform” and pledged to “look into this further.”