My TalkTalk Story - by Jay

My photographer friend Jay recently tried to obtain "free" broadband from TalkTalk. The result was the kind of nightmarish customer service experience that is becoming more and more commonplace. Here is his story.

April 2006
What an amazing offer: £20.99 for 8Meg unlimited broadband and telephone, including free national and international calls & no BT line rental, and I can keep my number! This is too good to be true, and there can’t possibly be a catch! Am over the moon and sign up with TalkTalk immediately.

May 2006
The phone part of my line has switched over. Had to pay £39 one-off swap-over-god-knows-what fee – but I’m sure it’ll be worth it in the end.

22nd June 2006
Got my free cheap-o-sucker USB modem and installation CD in the post today. I’ve got a Netgear ADSL router running now, which does the job just as good or better, especially without the compulsive installation of a TalkTalk virus scanner for £29 per year. Also got my new user name and password for the TalkTalk Broadband service. Will use it when the BT credentials stop working.

13th July 2006
My Broadband has gone down – which was to be expected. Must have been BT pulling out and switching me over to TalkTalk. Using my new TalkTalk credentials now, and broadband is back up and running. So far so good. My connection speed is still 2Meg though, but let's not question that.

12th August 2006
Wonder why BT keep billing me £25 for a broadband connection…

10th September 2006
Instead of saving £30 a month, I’m now paying £46. BT keep billing me, and so is TalkTalk. Now my question is: who is really supplying me with broadband?

29th September 2006
Phone BT to ask what’s going on. BT insist they supply me with broadband, and my connection had never been switched. The reason is that TalkTalk never got in touch with BT after I had passed on my MAC code. BT also let me know that both username and password have no relevance whatsoever. They suggest I talk to TalkTalk.

Emailed TalkTalk the same day, only to get a reply 5 days later. TalkTalk insist THEY are supplying me with broadband, and claim BT don’t know what they’re talking about. They suggest I phone them back and ask for a refund.

Phoned BT yet again. After a 30minute wait, I get through to somebody who warns me that if BT pull the plug on my line, I might lose broadband altogether. It shouldn’t happen though if I’m not with BT, but unfortunately nobody really knows. Sense major disaster on the horizon. Am put through to 3 different departments, until somebody can finally confirm that I definitely am with TalkTalk, that BT made a billing mistake, and that I’ll get a full refund. Glad we got that one sorted then! Confidence in BT is restored, and I’m almost sorry I left in the first place.

9th October 2006
Came back home after a week off, only to find that my broadband connection has now GONE DOWN! Exactly the situation I had tried to avoid. Hope of ever getting broadband from TalkTalk is rapidly waning.

11th October 2006
Phoned TalkTalk Customer Services at 8am in the morning to avoid the 3 hour queue I hear rumours about. Get through immediately to a snotty person named Mo, probably in a call centre in Albania. I tell him my whole story, although I can tell he neither listens, understands or cares. Am being told my service is live and to call Netgear Customer Support, as TalkTalk don’t give support to people who use equipment other than theirs. Haven’t been spoken to like this since 5th grade! Decide to reply to the email I got previously, hoping to get a reply from somebody who knows what they're talking about within the next week. It becomes clear at this point that switching away from BT was a very big mistake.

12th October 2006
Decide to write this story in case I’m locked away in a mental institution. The plan is to install their stupid modem and software and play by their rules, to see what they say. To be continued…

Digital Feng Shui

Despite being a life coach and sometimes being called upon to help others conquer their clutter, I am prone to collecting clutter myself. Yes, unlike many American life coaches, I do not pretend to have solved all my own problems yet!

But while I have learned some new habits to reduce the build up of papers, books and magazines, a whole new pristine space has opened up for me to make a mess of - and that's the digital world of my phone, PC and other personal gadgets.

As an example my Sky+ hard disc is full of stuff I must watch before I can record anything else, my mobile phone is filling up with the kind of dreadful snaps only a mobile's plastic camera lens can produce, my iPod has 1000 albums on it about 8 of which I listen to with any regularity (and all those are labelled wrongly), my email inbox needs more weeding than my garden, and I have so many favourites stored in Internet Explorer I'd need Google just to search through them!

Now all this cyber-clutter is terrible Feng Shui - the ancient Chinese practice has strong words to say on the piling up of such stagnant energy. I'm sure the fact that my mobile phone still has the number of every ex-girlfriend in it is ruining the flow of Chi in my relationships quadrant.

And a note to manufacturers - you guys are not helping. When I got my new Sky+ HD box, I still had 6 hours of telly recorded on my old Sky+ that I wanted to watch. No problem I thought, I'll leave the old one plugged into the TV and when I've had chance to watch the stuff on it, I'll sell it on eBay.

But when I sat down to watch some of my TV backlog, the old Sky+ box said "You must insert your Sky viewing card to watch recordings". I took my Sky card out of the new box and plugged it into the old one. Then the box said "You must have the satellite dish plugged in to watch the recordings". What? So every time I want to watch something on the old box, I have to take the viewing card out of the new one and unscrew the dish cable, put them both into the old box and then reverse the whole procedure when I've finished?

The result of course is that my TV clutter remains. Perhaps if I install a windchime near the telly my Chi will flow again?

Diary of an Early Adopter – Back to the 70’s

I belong to a class of consumers that marketers call “Early Adopters” (or alternatively, “Mugs”). This means my passion for technology makes me willing to buy version 1.0 of any half-baked gadget that the manufacturers can sneak past their Quality Assurance department.

Sometimes a piece of technology is so far ahead of its time it should never have been released from the lab. My first memory of such a Technology Turkey was some time in the late 70’s. It was the first TV I ever saw with a remote control. Infrared remotes hadn’t been invented yet so what did this use? A sonic controller – that’s right, sound.

The remote had one button. I say a button, it was really a lever pressing on a bent piece of stressed metal that made a loud “clack” as it straightened. This clacker, forerunner to the modern zapper, performed only one function - to change to the next channel. By pressing the button repeatedly you could hop through all 3 British TV channels and start again at the beginning.

This wonderful invention was owned by a friend’s father, local restaurateur Mr Collodi, making him one of the first men in Britain to gain control of the remote. His reign of power did not last long however as his children quickly discovered that the sound from the remote was not the only thing that caused the TV to change channel. Whenever one of them slammed the door to the playroom, the TV would turn over. Soon, they worked out that they could have the same effect as the remote by clapping their hands. This quickly led to a battle of control between Mr Collodi and his two children. Dad would press the clacker to watch the football and the kids would clap their hands to change to the cartoons. Dad would press the clacker twice to get back to the football and the kids would just clap again.

During primetime, the Collodi’s lounge would reach a frenzy of clacking and clapping not normally seen outside a Tourettes convention. The high pitch sounds would eventually set the dog off barking. And each bark would add to the channel hopping.

Today in 2006 it takes 3 remote controls just to turn my TV on. The total button count on these remotes is 149. Perhaps I’d be better off with a one-button clacker.

Stop this blinking thing

Can we stop making gadgets like mobile phones with LEDs that flash all the time? The point of something flashing is to say "Hey, look over here, this needs your attention". It's a police siren that says "Get out of the way dummy!" or a warning light on an aircraft saying "Engine fallen off". It does not mean "Everything's AOK, situation normal, nothing to see here".

So why is it manufacturers insist on creating mobile phones, headsets and other devices that flash constantly during normal operation? My mobile flashes once a second to say, well I'm not sure what actually, except "I'm a mobile phone". But when my brain sees something flash out of the corner of my eye, my instinct is to turn and look at it. This is not good when I am driving my car at night and the interior is lit up by my phone and bluetooth headset impersonating a mobile disco.

Wait, I think I have a solution. Where's the Tippex?

If you are not prone to epileptic fits and find it easy to ignore flashing lights, you may want to get the otherwise rather good Motorola Bluetooth Headset from Amazon.

It works pretty much as a headset should - switches on when you fold open the mic and connects automatically to most mobile phones although it needs to be handled gently as the build is quite fragile.

"I've got 10 minutes spare, I'll just upgrade the software on my Treo phone..."

And 3 hours and 172 steps later, I have a working phone again. This has without doubt been one of the more hellish install procedures I have ever been foolish enough to attempt.

It started badly when the installation said I needed to free up 15 Megabytes of memory on the phone before I could start. I don't remember the phone having that much memory free when I first bought it. I very carefully moved programmes from the main phone memory to the expansion card one by one to free some space. This quickly resulted in the disappearance of all my contacts, my entire calendar and pretty much all data of any value. So I anxiously moved the key programmes back. The data was still blank.

Now in theory, all this data is backed up in Microsoft Outlook on my PC. But a terrifying thought struck me - what if when I re-sync the phone, Outlook sees the empty data on it and deletes everything on the PC to match the blank state of the phone? This is exactly the kind of disastrous action Microsoft would set as the default. I was concerned that the combined idiocy of Microsoft and PalmOne might create a kind of chain-reaction of stupidity that would leave me in a state of total technological amnesia. I backed up my Outlook data file as insurance.

Things sped up from this point as I now had nothing to lose - my phone being about as useful as a dead goldfish in its present state.

Numerous resets and re-syncs later, I do have a working phone with data in it. Is the sound any better (the reason for attempting the upgrade)? Well it does seem to have improved somewhat - but only time will tell whether it was worth the pain to get here...

PalmOne Treo 650 "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

If any piece of technology deserves to kick off this site naming and shaming the very worst of new technology, it is my PalmOne Treo 650. It runs the Palm OS and functions reasonably well as an organisor, succeeding in cramming one day's diary appointments onto one screen. The only problem is that noone can hear what I am saying on the phone. I'm curious about the quality control process that went into this product. They must have made a phone call with the thing right? Or is the ability to make a call no longer considered an important feature for a phone?

What is particularly strange and warrants our first "Complete Clucker" award at TechnologyTurkey is the unique one-sided conversation feature. It appears that while the person calling me is talking, they cannot hear anything from my phone as if it has cut my microphone out. It's rather like having a conversation on a walkie-talkie. I've had a number of conversations with the kind of people who rarely pause for breath where I can't get a word in because my "yes, but"s and "hold on a minutes" are never heard by them (this seems to suit some people just fine of course).
I think I'm going to have to start punctuating my conversations with the word "over".

But it gets worse - if someone calls me from a noisy bar or in the middle of traffic, they can't hear anything I say! My girlfriend avoids speaking to me on my mobile because it sounds like I'm not listening to her. This is quite an achievement - a communication tool that actually damages relationships.

I emailed PalmOne tech support about the problem and they replied saying that I needed to perform a hard reset to remove all my software and personalised settings before they could help. Is this a test to get rid of support queries? Perhaps the NHS should try this "Please abstain from all food and drink for 7 days before consulting your GP".

But there is hope. There is a software update (although currently Orange has mislaid the installer on their website). And software updates always fix everything. At least that's what I always think before I install them. Maybe that's the problem - I'm still an optimist.

If you have similar experiences, can explain the strange behaviour of this phone, or have a suggestion for an alternative gadget (which can actually make phone calls), please post a comment.

If you are a pathological optimist and want to try a new Treo in the hope that version 1.20 of the software will work, try Amazon below.