13 July, 2009

GAH!

There are a myriad of reasons I enjoy living in Germany, but quality of Internet service certainly isn't one of them. We have constant outages, and when we do have service it's remarkably slow. I'm willing to bet we'd be better served in a third world country!

Those of you who were around last year will probably remember the struggles I had with our previous provider. Our experience with the new one hasn't been much better.

Today I called for the umpteenth time about service outages-- Internet probably works here only about 1/2 of the time. Spent more than an hour on the phone with our provider last week and it didn't resolve anything.

Today when I called and told the guy the history and that I'd downloaded the new firmware he said "No you didn't." I was totally shocked and confirmed I had, with the help of his colleague. And he said: "OK, fine. then what did you do?" He was totally testing me!

Since I was paying by the minute so that he can be rude to me, I gave up and we went through all the same steps I did last week to download the software together.

Then he asked: "Are you connected wireless or with the cable?" When I said "Wireless" he said: "OK". I thought this was is weird, because last time I had to do it over a cable connection. He then had me download and run the firmware update. And of course it didn't work. So he said: "OK, then it's not our problem. there's nothing more I can do."

When I blew up at him he asked: "Are you connected using wireless or a cable?" And I said: "Wireless, I told you!" To which he answered: "You should never update firmware over wireless! Check the readme file-- you were supposed to use a cable! Goodbye."

My blood is still boiling!

7 comments:

Goofball said...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH strangle strangle Fqkljfqlmsufqomsui damned !

do you know this guy's name? this should be reported to his manager?
Is there some German neutral "ombudsdienst" to report this kind of non-service too? This is too insane

Betsy said...

You know, I've had many conversations with internet technicians that all went similarly. For some reason it's apparently acceptable for customer service to be rude!

The worst was when we first moved here and I was trying to iron out some problems with our new connection. The technician was incredibly rude and ended the call by saying: "Call me back when you've learned some German."

I don't understand why this is acceptable behavior here! I'm paying them for a service, shouldn't they fix problems that interfere with this service???

anno said...

GRRRRRRR! Raised my blood pressure, too. I take it that the "technical service" guy is the extent of the company's "customer service" department"?

FWIW, based on the stories I've heard about Comcast service in our area, they all train at the same place...

Hope something improves..soon!

Astrid said...

Arrrgh!! This post get MY blood boiling... It's so annoying when you as a customer is totally powerless!

Today I had prepared myself for a battle calling the ADSL provider to cancel my 2nd account I've had for 6 months. But the person was surprisingly kind, and even gave me two free months worth of subscription for the primary adsl account... I hung up and wasn't quite sure what had happened!

Then I went to the local council for some information and met the typical French government workers and suddenly the world (read: France) returned to normal with it's complete lack of service!

christina said...

Grrrr. Not again. Incompetent boobs are everywhere. We've found that a well-worded letter to the head honcho can work wonders in cases like this. That and simply cancelling the contract as soon as possible and telling them exactly why you're doing it.

Betsy said...

you know, I've tried sending letters but unfortunately they don't seem to make any difference whatsoever.

Internet providers are running a racket here-- once you've signed on you're locked in for two years and they could care less if you're happy with their service or not.

There doesn't seem to be any way around it. If you want to have an internet connection you're pretty much at their mercy, unfortunately...

Acedog said...

My youngest son lives in Canada and complains about the speed of the Internet there. Last year at a Media conference there was a techie I spoke with who informed me, and showed me the stats, that Canada actually enjoys superior internet speed to that of the U.S. Unfortunately, he had nothing to say about rude customer service reps, a misnomer if there ever was one.