Telstra Tales

[Cliff Rogers]

...I dont work for telstra, I have in the past....

...this board regularly has members slag off the carriers so I thought I'd wanted to show the other side of the argument for a change.

If it was my phone I'd contact the carrier, progress the fault, escalate the fault to conclusion... why not address this with your local pollie instead of flaming this board ?

I realise regional areas are sub standard. ...you're right slackness should not be excused, rather addressed.

Touched a nerve did I?

I have been escalating the fault, are you NOT paying attention?
That's why they know who I am & where I live.

And, I'm NOT flaming this board, the topic is "Telstra Tales" & it in "Nothing to do with woodwork" I'm meerly adding my Telstra Tales.
If you had read my story carefully before you fell off your high horse you will notice that I was advocating staying with Bludy Telstra 'cos if you (or anyone else) have a hardware fault & you are not with Telstra, you have F'n buckleys of ever having it fixed.
I have a problem & I know that if I stay with Telstra & bug the spit out of them for long enough, they will eventually fix it. We, the neighbour & I that keep having our phone lines swapped over, have been on their case & the neighbour has taken it to the pollies 'cos he's been having trouble longer that I have. I'm still at the point where I have a Complaint & a Fault & a case officer.

Now I'm off to kick a few 'front desk' heads

PS. I bet you used to work for them when they were PMG....
Who knows what PMG stands for?

[johnmc]

snip
Now the result of my story is as follows: Kooee is acepting no liability however they are saying that I will not be billed for very much. This will be notified in January and I am told that that bill will be credited by some amount. I have to wait and see. As of now I am back with Telstra and Bigpond.

From what I gathered in your earlier posts, Kooee began charging you for a service for which you did not ask. Why then would you even contemplate accepting their bill even if it's not for very much ? Make a stand - don't pay.

[Toggy]

I'm with you Cliff.
I'm sick to death of reporting the faults on this line. Days on end with no internet access due to noise on line. Hard to hear on the phone because of noise. All because of cost cutting. Because most of the lines between here & the exchange have crapped themselves they have installed some Ram8 doohickey to use the only servicable lines. I know where I would like to ram it. Would you believe that the standard practice around here is the hang new bits of phone line off the farm fences. doesnt handle cows chewing it & burn offs too well. They finally put it underground and the service is worse.

Couple of months ago had a big lightening strike nearby. (Line was underground now) Fried the new crap8 and a lot of the exchange. Now every time it rains, off the air again. This is for a service I pay good money for. All I want is to have the service I pay for, which is a clear useable phone line. NOT a continuing fault. Some shineybum rang the other day wanting to know how wonderful the last repair job was. Crap was the answer, I was about to fault it again.
Some supertech rang the Mrs today to say they would be working on the line again tomorrow. She told him it seemed fairly good at the moment, but don't ask hubby when he gets kicked off the internet for about the fifth time. The tech tells her that from where he is (probably outer Gondwanaland) that he is monitering the call and the line is exceedingly poor, with constant multiple faults showing up. And this is from new equipment supposedly replaced several times.

And ZED; if you're going to fall out of your tree with this post, please try not to hurt yourself when you come a gutsa on landing. All most people want is fair service for fair pay.

Rant off.

Ken

[Cliff Rogers]

.... Having worked at a front desk I am usually polite unless I feel that the operator is being condescending....

Bludy hell, don't start me on the 'front desk' help/support/fault logging desk & call dispatch operators........ :mad:

This topic could end up being closed by an administrator.

One of the most useless 'occupations' (for want of a better word) in this country or on this planet is the bippy that most organisations pay to answer the phone, especially the phone number they hand out for people to ring if they have a problem, STRUTH.

And Zed, before you start on me again, I'm coming from BOTH sides on this one.

I'm a techo, have been for 27 almost 28 years now. For the last 26 of them, I've had a 'fault report/job card' handed/faxed/e-mailed to me.
I do get lucky sometimes when I actually answer the phone & take the fault report direct from a customer/client/user/whatever so I know the difference.

Anyway, I digress, back to the main grizzle/moan/whinge/complaint.
By & large, all the 'front desk' help/support/fault logging desk & call dispatch operators I ever met bar about 3 in the entire world are not worth feeding.
I do not know why the companies that employ these guppies do so.
It does zip/zilch nothing for their public image.

Of the 3 that were any good, one retired last year, one is now the head philosopher of new religious order in Nimbin & the other still answers the phone for a company in Melbourne that is having troubles paying it's bills & I fear he will be unemployed by Easter next year.

INVARIABLY, when I contact the customer/client/user/whatever to say I have the job of looking at their delinquent piece of electronics, the details on the 'fault report/job card' are NOTHING like the problem.
I also do not believe how many times I find that a call has been passed to a Techo when the 'front desk' help/support/fault logging desk & call dispatch operator could have told the poor silly customer/client/user/whatever how to get it going again.
Sure, I could go out there, turn it up the right way or whatever & charge them for their own stupidity but it's NOT the right way to do business.

Now, by & large, I'm talking about the ones on the public helps desks, not the internal help desks, there is a higher percentage of intelligent life on an internal company help desk to that of the ones who talk to poor silly old Joe Public.
If you are a member of Joe Public & you happen to score the number of the 'Internal' guru, cherish it, it's like gold.

Anyway, enough now or I'll start on the 'message taking' ability of the average 'dumbass blond receptionist' next.

[journeyman Mick]

Zed,
you live in the largest city in Australia. I doubt you understand just how poor services are by comparison in regional areas. As you say, the problems are being addressed, that is the companies are spending a lot of money on PR and advertising and a little bit on repairs/maintenance. Everytime we do a controlled burn with the rural fire brigade I ring Telstra to let them know so that they know to expect some burnt cables. A friend of mine works for telstra in the office that has all the cable plans, but his plans don't show any exposed or aerial cables because they don't "exist". Of course every time there's a fire or lightning strike consumers discover otherwise. Likewise, Ergon has a totally crappy network around here, we had two fires about 500 metres from my place on wednesday caused by fallen lines. They won't actually fix things properly, just repair stuff when it falls down. The unwritten policy is to just keep patching it up and hope that it gets wiped out by a bushfire or cyclone so that they get government money to upgrade it.

Mick

[barnsey]

Hmmm - very heated here aren't we :confused:

Lets face it if we encountered a service organisation serving the likes of this forum we would collectively put them to the wall.

Not so easy in this situation. Amcor management have now been asked to answer charges of collusion - funny that - those in the industry have been putting up with it for years. :confused:

Now I'm not sure how long memories are but before the telco freedom I moved house. I rang the gas co - they did it! I rang the electric co - they did it!! Rang Teltra or at least their forebears - sorry you'll have to put it in writing :mad: :confused:

Now I don't care what argument you want to put up - telco services in this country are terrible :mad: There's a theme through this whole thread that agrees with that sentiment yet there's a lot saying don't move from Telstra it's even worse Well let's just stick with something below mediocrity - that makes good sense

The competition is forced into using a network that was terrible from the start and the ones who created it are the ones still administering it - ask an Optus employee what they think

Don't worry - little Johnny is going to sell the whole lot to the public and let them bear the brunt of 50 years and blame the new owners :eek: Ask the family investors of the Telstra floats what they think of their investment :eek:

Still there is a record of success there - look how the number of drop outs on your mobile has reduced

Not sure of the remedy and I sincerely feel sorry for the customer service people but start aiming the criticism where it is deserved I say

That soap box comes out and gets me everytime

FWIW

Jamie

PS Sorry Shane it was late Took me nearly an hour to wade through it all and it had me all fired up

[Barry_White]

This is my Telstra tale.

I live 18klms from the exchange and when I first moved here 25 years ago from Sydney and applied for a phone they told me there were no lines available. All the lines where then overhead on poles and once the phone line crossed your boundry fence the people here had to maintain their own phone lines and if you complained about a fault and it was on your property you paid.

I pestered them for six months for a phone and only because of Telstra putting in the microwave link between Tamworth and Armidale they were able to provide a line by utilising the old overland trunk lines.

After about five years they came through with a D9 bulldozer and buried the lines underground and put elevated joints about every 250 to 500 metres which where more suseptable to lightening strikes and in the storm season we would be calling them out after every storm but that was in the days when they had techs to burn and they would be out the next day.

After the first sell off of Telstra that was when you then had ring these call centres and you had to talk to a dumb blonde (Just kidding). Before that you just rang your local centre whereas now when you ring up you don't know where they are. Usually they are on the other side of the country.

But things have slowly deteriated since then. This is mainly because so many where offered redundencys and there just isn't the staff to service the areas and some of these guys might have to travel up to 150km in a day from one job to another and if you are lucky you might get an appointment in a fortnight.

You could call this fortunate or unfortunate but about 2 years a go I had a couple of mini strokes and by being fortunate I am on Telstras Medical Priority List.

What does this mean. If you have a fault it usually means that it will be attended to within 12 hours and a maximum of 24 hours including Saturdays and Sundays.

Because I put ISDN on for the Internet just over 12 months ago you ring a different number for faults and it means you don't hang on waiting. You get to talk to an intelligent person within about 2 minutes and because when my phone number pops up on their computer screen it says "MEDICAL ALERT" and they say we will put you through to the medical alert team and when they say JUMP every one says how high.

Since I put the ISDN on, because of storms and lightening strikes I have had about 15 callouts and had the ISDN Modem replaced seven times all at their expense.

They tell me ISDN is not much good over 15 km and as I am 18 km from the exchange they have had to put in a relay half way to regenerate the sine wave and of course this has been zapped a couple of times.

They suggested to me "Why not put on 2 way satelite for the internet". I said you want too much money for it. They said "No you can put it on for $129.00 and $69.00 a month with the HiBis Subsidy"

This will give me a 500m download/upload at 256k and 15c a meg over the 500m. As I only average about 400meg a month. So that happens in January.

As far as changing Telcos I really think out in the bush for what little you would save leaving Telstra would not be worth the hassels because I have heard so many war stories from friends that have changed and i always reckon the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.

Well thats my Telstra tale for what its worth.

[barnsey]

Barry,

I like your logic and at least, at the moment anyway, Telstra and the government are sensitive to the remote ones because ..... not going there

But as is mentioned earlier in the thread, Telstra have this policy of telling anyone as little as possible. Somewhere, here I'm sure, was a tale of someone going to broadband and their usage went up significantly and they had a bill bigger than Clinton. :eek:

You have probably done your research - motto is don't trust 'em :confused:

Jamie

[echnidna]

Who knows what PMG stands for?
__________________
Catchya,
Cliff

It usta be Paddy McGinty

[Zed]

post master general.

cliff, I aint that old mate.

[Barry_White]

I used to be a Telegram Boy working for the Post Master General.

Who knows what a Telegram is.

[jackiew]

someone once sent me a telegram and I'm not THAT old!!!

Is anyone else having problem with bigpond's revamped webmail. I've gone from being able to read my mail ( and sort through the copious amounts of spam they let through because I won't pay for their filter) fairly easily to 9 times out of 10 not being able to even see whether I've got mail - and then when I can see it I can't open it or delete it or even swap from one page of mail ( down from 20 per page to 10 ) to the next. Some improvement - NOT.

It was annoyed enough when they moved the webmail link from the main page and you had to scroll through a menu to get at it ... this is even more of a retrograde step.

why do they need to tinker with these things. I just want to read my mail - I don't want all the flash bits they want to provide me with.

[ozwinner]

Im with Bizmail, I get no spam and no viruses.

I get notification the viruses have been deleted.
All in the price of the deal, which is $59 per month for 8 gig, no uploads.

Al

[Peter R]

Who knows what PMG stands for?
__________________
Catchya,
Cliff

It usta be Paddy McGinty

Parramatta Monkey Gang

Peter R.

[journeyman Mick]

PMG = Pig's Meat & Gravy,
at least that's what a bloke who worked for them for ever told me!

Mick