Mental Meanderings

Touchy Internet Connection - to trust or not to trust

My internet connection has been playing up these last few days. I suspect perhaps all this rain is effecting the phone cords sunk in the ground between my house and our telecommunications pillar. It's about time Telstra did some maintence but since Telstra tend to take forever to do anything I'm not holding my breath. Someday the telecommunications industry won't be solely controlled by Telstra and we'll get better prices and service all around.

It's been about three months now since I applied to my telephone provide (Bdigital) to switch to their broadband plan. I'm currently using ozemail broadband so I know my line is ADSL enabled but for some reason Bdigital have to wait for Telstra to get back to them about the quality of the line. I'm just glad I have an existing broadband connection. Paul applied for Telstra's own broadband and they told him they couldn't activate his line until August. Talk about slack, but it's their loss, so many months without a regular paying account. It doesn't sound like good business practice but when they have complete control of all the cables in the country they don't really care who they piss off. I mean what's the worst we could do? Go elsewhere for our business? Nope, can't.

On more unreliable business practices it's now been three months and I still don't own this house. 3 weeks it took them just to get the title from conveyencing and since my bank were the ones on the title anyway that is just rediculous. Anyway, last week I called again because the week before I'd signed the papers and was told that finance should be through by the end of the week. A week later still nothing so I called again, "next day or two" That was this time last week so I called again. Apparently it's on the desk of a senior manager who has to sign off the closing of Paul's mortgage account but it should be all sorted out in the next day or two. If it's not in by noon Friday I'll call again. And again noon Monday, and noon Tuesday and every damn business day until it's done. Imagine if I'd been waiting all this time on the finance to go through, settlement has come and gone. What if I'd been waiting to move into the house? What if Paul was waiting on the money to buy his own house? As it is my mother is waiting on a repayment of a loan I owe her so she can settle her own new house. It's just crazy, we are running out of time and I can't understand why it's taken so long in the first place. I've already signed the papers now so I can't even change my mind and go elsewhere without it costing me a heap of fee's. *sighs takes a big breath to calm down*

Basically business practice in some places suck. If it were my business I'd be firing people until they did their jobs right. On the phone with the bank today I got passed around about four desks until they put me onto the woman who'd been handling my claim. Technically it's no longer her case because she's passed it onto finance but she was at least able to chase it up for me and didn't hand me off to someone else again. I was a little worried that my file had gone missing for a while there, no one seemed to have any idea what was going on.

Didn't I just take a deep breath? Ok, I'm finished ranting now. It's obviously a bad day for business. I might leave everything in that sense for a few days.

I just wanted to let you know that my internet is a little unstable at the moment so I can't promise to be here every day, nor at any particular time. Hopefully it won't last all winter (the next three months). But then it's Telstra, wouldn't surprise me at all.