Classic BT Idiocy

Another exam­ple of gross idiocy from BTOpenworldYahoo!Interweb, or what­ever they’re called nowadays:

If there’s a prob­lem with your credit card pay­ment to BT for inter­net access, they give you seven days grace before cut­ting off your con­nec­tion and send an email to warn you of the prob­lem. This is a good thing, obviously.

Since the switch to BT Yahoo!, it seems that the same does not apply to your email account - there’s no grace period, and as soon as a credit card pay­ment fails, your mail goes dead.

Now, can you guess which account they send the warn­ing email to?

Yup, it’s the very account which cannot send or receive mail from the moment your account goes into debt.

So, I just spent half an hour double-​checking that every­thing was as it should be at my end. Then I spent another half hour being told to check every­thing I had just checked by a tech­ni­cal sup­port advi­sor who quite clearly knew a hell of a lot less about Macs run­ning 10.3.2 than I do (which is not much). Only then did it occur to me to ask whether my account was up to date. Only then did I find out that it wasn’t, and that that infor­ma­tion was on the screen my tech. sup­port friend had been look­ing at for the past half hour.

Now, I can’t get angry with the people on the end of the ‘phone - they’re under­paid and barely trained - but the idiot who designed a system to send out warn­ing emails to accounts that the very same system has just taken offline should be, I dunno, thrown to a baying crowd of dis­grun­tled BT cus­tomers armed only with their use­less Speed­touch USB modems.

Posted at 4pm on 09/03/04 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
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