For my own sake I ought to just be thankful the whole episode is behind me and move on with my life, but frankly I'm still just too pissed about it all not to spew forth some venomous words. As some reading this are already aware, we are moving houses and cities in the next month or so and so I've been spending a lot of time on the phone and on the Internet stopping, starting, and moving various services like hydro, water, gas, phone, cable, telephone, and Internet. It is clearly an easier task now than it was only a dozen years ago or so, the Internet makes it much easier to find the providers' contact information and to follow the process involved, but it is still a complicated and time-consuming activity as each service provider has it's own processes and none are trying to minimize YOUR time.
Now, my business is moving at the same time and so I had double the contacts and twice the fun, but still things seemed to be going well ... I thought I was done, in fact, until I got a bill from Rogers. It seemed that my "home phone" for my business address was still going to charge me for next month even though there was no service possible but I didn't see that as a big deal so I called Rogers to ensure the account had, in fact, been cancelled. It is now nearly 72 hours later and to be honest I have NO IDEA whether or not that account has been cancelled but we did have the distinct privilege of recalling what life is like without phone and Internet for more than two days. It seems that the representative who took that call managed to confuse my accounts and cancelled all of our home services.
Now I understand how mistakes can happen and so when my phone didn't work the next day following that call, I took the news that the service was off gracefully, I can manage to live with a few hours outage, it was a minor inconvenience because we still had the Internet and so still had outbound calls. But then I was told that I wasn't going to have this reconnected today, they weren't sure why only that it couldn't get done. I decided that such incompetence should not go unpunished and said that I wanted my move cancelled, I would find another phone and Internet provider in London. I talked with somebody on the phone with another technician standing there listening to me when I said "so I am cancelling the new service in London, I expect my phone and Internet to be reconnected here [at home] today, right?" To which I was assured the answer was "correct". But correct it was not, that was only the start of the trouble to come.
About an hour following that conversation and I find that rather than the phone now working, the Internet was cancelled and we found our house utterly without any connection.
What followed was literally hours of discussions spread over two full days with no less than 15 different Rogers employees in, at least, 4 different departments: "Tech Support". "Customer Support", "Billing" and "Back Office" ... also involved was IT and management. I think I was physically holding the phone for at least 4 full hours, most of the time listening to musac (actually far worse than musac, this is some computer-generated tune that lasts all of 60 seconds and then repeats endlessly!), and we did a whole lot of waiting for the call back that never happened. It was really beginning to feel like we'd be connectionless until we moved!
This morning, very early before 7am, I finally found the help required. The call started the same as they all did, through the telephone maze/menu system, keying in various numbers including my home phone number, eventually leading to a live human ... in this case Maria ... who starts the conversation by asking me to repeat all of the information I just keyed in on the phone (I do not know why I need to key it in only to have to have them key it in) and then saying, "I'm going to have to put you on hold for a moment while I look into this" .... the kiss of death according to all my previous experience, but not this time.
Maria recognized exactly what she had to do, though she would have to wait until 8am for the office to open. She would call me back once she made that connection and we'd 'have this solved very quickly' ... to say the least, I was skeptical, but really what else could I do but say "thanks", grab a reference number, hang up and wait. I fully expected that at 8:30 I'd would have given up and called back myself but to my surprise at 8:05 my cell rang and Maria had found Keith and he was ready to help.
These two must be the good ones that get the good hours, unlike all the other folks I'd dealt with, they both recognized the problem ("your service was disconnected early and your devices were claimed to be returned ... I've seen this before") and while I was on the phone with him, the Internet returned. The phone probably returned then as well but the first person who came on site 72 hours previously plugged the phone back in incorrectly after troubleshooting (that was my 15th person who helped me find and fix that particular problem).
Lessons learned? The only one I can think of is, use the early morning to call in for support, that seems to be when the smart people work.
