Telstra: They either don't care or are completely incompetent

Monday, October 2, 2006

The family and I moved into our brand new house at the end of July. It was very exciting. We are still waiting for a telephone service from Telstra . herein lies our tale of woe.

1. We requested a phone from Telstra on the 17th of July, a week before we moved in.
2. The contractor arrives at the end of the week but says he can't find a pit (a connection pit to the cable running down the street) to connect to. He then goes away.
3. We try to find out what is going on but Telstra says it's nothing to do with them, try Transfield, their contractor. We ring Transfield and they say it's nothing to do with them, try the sub contractor. So we ring him and he says he'll pass the message onto the guy who actually does the work.
4. We contact the poor guy doing the work and a week later he says he'll need to dig one and is seeking approval
5. Telstra replies saying he should use the one for the existing house.
6. He replies saying it's a new house and there is no pit.
7. He comes back to us saying there' a pit on the opposite corner of our block but we'll need to dig a trench, distance: ~100m
8. We have the trench dug the next day, so he can return on the weekend to connect the phone (which was kind of him) the 23rd of August.
9. It's now the 23rd of August, the contractor arrives like he says he would and connects the phone. But it doesn't work. There's something wrong with the cable on the street between our neighbours (who have a working phone) and us, about 60m from our pit. This is bad news.
10. We are assigned a support contact from Telstra who says that work has been scheduled for 23rd of September and asks if we would like an interim phone. It appears we have no choice so we accept the phone. We are not allowed to use it for Internet or free phone call numbers.
11. It takes a week to get us the phone, it's a CDMA mobile phone unit with a big aerial. We have very crappy mobile reception as we are just out of the metropolitan area. The phone sucks. It's crackly, it drops out a lot and it sometimes takes multiple tries to ring in or out.
12. We wait patiently until the 23rd. On the 23rd we notice that no one has appeard to do any work.
13. We ring Telstra and discover we have a new support contact. The new one is much harder to reach and we spend a few days playing phone message tag. Once we make contact she informs us the contractor is hard to get hold of and she'll let us know what's going on soon.
14. She rings back and says aomeone will be out on thursday the 28th of september to contect our phone!
15. On the 28th my Wife receives a phone call from the contractor, he's at the exchange ready to disconnect our interim phone. My Wife advises that perhaps he shouldn't do that since we believe no work has been done at all on our street. Sure enough he comes down and finds that to be true.
16. Today is the 2nd of October. My wife rings Telstra ready to do battle. She talks for over an hour and gets nowhere. Surprised? We are left with a vague promise to get back to us.

Here's the current status:

Apparently some guy did come out to our street and thought that he had found an alternative phone line for us to connect to. This was wrong. The phone line is broken. It was probably broken at the start of the year when Energex put our power poles in.

Our current status has delivered us 3 swift kicks in the nuts and here they are:

1. The Interim phone: if we do not accept we have no standing to make complaints. If we accept we loose the right to get compensation from Telstra.
2. It's all our fault: the time from the 17th of july to the 23rd of August is considered, by Telstra, to be customer delay. It doesn't matter that we repeatedly did as instructed immediately it was asked of us, because they delegate to contractors it's out of their hands and they class it all as customer delay.
3. We have registered a formal complaint but Telstra do not action complaints until a phone connection is completed.

So that's it folks. We live just outside the metro area and we are so low on the priority scale that we are powerless to get any reponse from Telstra. Telstra have a monopoly and just do not give a crap. Their staff are clueless and generally unhelpful.

Maybe I should by some T3 shares and attend the shareholder meetings, that might get me a phone...

Random outings from a chaotic mind