So after my recent rantings about BT and Sky I decided to give Sky another try today. Phoned the second number that they had given me, there was no key pressing I was put straight through to a nice friendly lady. I said that I needed to give my mac code for switchover and she took it off me there and then. Two minutes and one pleasant conversation later it was all done.
How can this be the same company that drove me crazy just two days before.
Today I am very, very, very annoyed and I feel the need to have a good old rant about it. A few days ago I received a phone call from Sky, they have just started they’re broadband in my area and were offering a very good price to switch from my current BT broadband. We set up the switch over on the phone and all I needed to do next was get my mac code from BT and phone Sky back with it. Easy I foolishly thought.
So today I phoned BT to try and get my mac code. Ninety minutes later (I am not kidding), after having spoke to countless people in different departments and putting up with many automated switchboards I finally got through to someone who could give me a mac code. They then proceeded to spend ten minutes trying to talk me out of switching with various offers none of which came close to the Sky offer. Finally with me trying to be as polite as I possibly can while my temper is brewing inside me she gives me my mac code.
So with a sigh of relief I phone Sky to give them the code, I use the number that THEY gave me to call. Automated switchboard: Press 1, 5, 2, 1 etc. finally speak to someone:
“Hi, I have a mac code here to change my broadband over to sky”
“Sorry this is the wrong number, you will need to call 0800 blah blah”
Sound of my head hitting the desk. Phone the other number: Press 1, 4, 1, 2 etc.
“Hi, I have a mac code here to change my broadband over to sky”
“Sorry this is the wrong number, you will need to call 08705 blah blah”
With gritted teeth I explain that I’ve already called that number and they put me through to this one. Person on the other end isn’t in the least bit interested and says they will put me though. Internal ringing and then I am greeted to the same automated message from my first call. Much jumping around and screaming, while I wait to talk to someone. Explain what’s going on and plead that I can just give my mac number to someone pleeeeassse. No interest at all from the person on the end just want to pass me back to the same second bloody phone number again, even though I told them I’ve already called it. No help at all, lose my temper, tell Sky to shove it and hang up.
What annoys me is the total lack of interest from anyone at BT or Sky in helping me out, unless they were the right person all they could care about was passing me off onto someone else even when I patiently explained again and again that I have already spoken to other people.
I know when I calm down I will try Sky again, as at the end of the day it will save me money, but the whole inefficient, bloated and uncaring system has just pissed me off so much. Shame on you BT and shame on you Sky.
OK I know, I haven’t posted an entry for ages, that’s one thing I didn’t want to do with this blog but events have overtaken me for a few days. I have been actively seeking some contract work and that has taken over quite a bit of time. Also this weekend we had our first tenants going into the caravan so I had to spend a long weekend doing some last minute DIY jobs down there.
Poor excuses I know, but my little brain couldn’t cope with too many things at one time. Hopefully tomorrow I will post something a little more interesting or useful.
Even though it’s been something I have been meaning to try for some time now, last week was the first time I got around to publishing an article to article directories as a promotion tool. I’ve read time and time again that article submission is a great promotion tool but I just never got around to trying it out. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the concept to anyone reading this, but just in case I’ll try and explain a little. If you’re familiar with the concept then skip a paragraph.
The basic concept is that you write an interesting and original article on a subject of your choice, then you submit that article to a whole set of article directory sites that will hopefully accept and publish it. The promotion part of it comes from the ability to post links to whatever site you want to promote either in the article or your author biography. Examples of some of the bigger article directories include Ezine Articles and Go Articles. There’s also the article directory that I run called Digital Articles.
In order to try and save some time in the whole distribution process I used a third party service called iSnare.com. For just a few dollars per article, they will distribute it to a whole load of directories for you, assuming they approve your article that is. So I created an article based on my experiences of re-directing one website to another, something that I’ve spoke of earlier here and I feel suitably stung by to talk about with some knowledge.
Isnare claim it will take about three days to check and approve your article but with my submission it took about a week. However once it was published, it did seem to start to get distributed very quickly. As I write this, Google is currently showing 227 links to the article and this is in just a few days. The figure is at the moment going up by at least 50 a day. It’s too early to say if this distribution will have any effect on the two sites that I linked to in the article but time will tell.
If you are going to try it I would recommend that you write something unique that isn’t used on any other of your websites. You really don’t want your own websites to be tagged as having duplicate content. Try and make it as informative and interesting as you can and of course pick a subject where you know what your talking about. I found a good method was to take a blog post that I’d written about and expand it into a much more detailed article.
If your interested in seeing how my article is doing now check the google search results below:
Do you like my new starfield header for the blog, I designed it myself in photoshop and I’m quite proud of it. I did take some basic pointers from a few tutorials but I think it came out really well. I wish I had more time to research photoshop more, it’s an incredible tool and even a total novice like me can come up with some good images with a little time and knowledge.
I want to share a small story of something that just happened to me, in the hope that it will prevent others falling into the same trap. I have been using an online game rental company for a while to rent Xbox360 games. I’m sure you know the kind of deal, pay xx amount a month and rent as many games as you want in the time but you can only have one out at a time. The company in question is called www.swapgame.com.
All was well until I decided to cancel the account as I didn’t feel I was using it enough and not getting my money’s worth. Now I had no real concerns at the time as I had also recently cancelled my Amazon DVD rental service and it was a totally painless exercise. With Amazon all I needed to do was fill in the online cancellation form, Amazon cleared out my waiting list and gave me a date by which I had to return my last hired out item, couldn’t be simpler.
So with this confidence I tried the same cancellation with swapgame, I filled in the online cancellation form and was told that I couldn’t cancel as I had a game out for rental. Hmm, I though if I just sent the game back they would send out another so the first thing I had to do was manually clear my rental queue, painfully one item at a time. So I cleared the queue and packed up the game I had in THEIR return envelope and sent it off. Now I just needed to wait for confirmation of the return and cancel the account.
And so I waited and I waited and then an email come through, notifying me of the next months charges just being taken. Naturally I was pretty annoyed by this so I logged into my account to see what was going on. I tried to cancel again using my account page and was told that I could not because I still had a game out, so I looked at my current rental list and nothing was showing. So I saw no other choice but to email the company.
Eventually days and days later I received an email stating that I hadn’t received the disk back and to cancel I would have to pay them the cost price of the game (£19.85) unless I could produce proof of postage. Apparently somewhere in the small print there’s a statement about getting proof of postage for returns, not that you’d know in they’re poorly laid out system. Of course I as any normal human being didn’t have the proof of postage as it never even occurred to me that I would need one. This was my mistake to assume that other companies would be as reliable as the likes of Amazon.
So after an email exchange with me expressing my disgust given the fact that I’ also jut paid £10 for a months service that I didn’t need they offered to combine the months rental with an additional £9.86 charge to cover the cost of the game. This they actually considered to be a fair deal. So here I am totally ripped off to the tune of £20 without a leg to stand on.
My advice is to be wary of the small print of these rental services as you can end up out of pocket when the post office makes a mistake, and to stick with the bigger better known companies like Amazon instead of the small unreliable vendors.
My blog is mainly about programming in .Net 2, website promotion and affiliate marketing although I do have the odd ramble on about anything that comes to mind.
