Gidday.
The unthinkable has happened. Something I thought I would never see in the time I am here. We actually have ADSL connected to our house!!!
It wasn't plain sailing, as you might have gathered from previous posts. And there was even more unplain sailing today.
It stated when we had a customer come in who wanted to receive faxes on their cellphone sim card, and send it to their fax machine via a special modem. Perfectly reasonable and achievable request. That is, until you involve telstra.
I haven't got a spare four hours so I won't transcribe the encounter, but needless to say it wasn't easy going. I was on hold at one point for 43 minutes straight. And the guy never told me he was even putting me on hold.
After ringing 4 different numbers, I got to a guy who said "you have the wrong department, when you get the computer voice prompts just say blah blah blah and it will give up and let you speak to people"
So I figured that sounded logical, and gave it a shot. The rest of the boys in the workshop now think I've gone mad, but I did successfully get to talk to a human.
Problem was, they were in Manila or some other foreign place who have never heard of faxes.
Me: "I want to see if this sim card has got fax receiving enabled"
Them: "All sim cards can receive texts sir"
Me: "No, not texts, faxs."
Them: "Yes sir, SMS and Text is same thing"
Me: "No No No, Fax! F A X! Facsimile! You know, you write stuff on a piece of paper and put it in and it goes down the phone wires in millions of tiny pieces and then magically appears as paper at the other end!"
Them: "Oh you mean a fax sir!"
Me: "Yes!!!"
Them: "Well you need to speak to another department"
Repeat this over 4 times in 4 hours and you start to tear your hair out. As John Cleese aptly stated: "If you want anything done in this country you have to complain until you're blue in the mouth!"
After over four hours of battling with these incompetent idiots, I finally got put through to someone who spoke English, (well Auzzie anyhow), and she was most helpful. Turns out they couldn't do it without a password, and I had to get the customer to authorise it, blah blah.
Anyhow, when I had the one useful person on the line I figured I might ask about the state of our Internet connection. Again on hold for half an hour, but after a long story which I won't go into here, basically the postman had not delivered our modem to our house, but to the local postshop. Apparently he is supposed to leave a card to call, which he neglected to do.
So the post shop were reluctant to give me my own mail. I ended up having to ID with drivers licences etc to prove I wasn't trying to rip off some poor bigpond customer. They needn't have worried, bigpong and telsta are doing a perfectly good job of that on their own.
Finally got the modem, took it home plugged it in.... dead. Not a sign of life. Typical of this god forsaken country. Rang telstra yet again... blah blah'ed my way through the computer, got to a humanish thing, and filed a fault report.
They rang me back about an hour later, half way through the sim/fax issue, so I started asking them about that, and then he managed to stop me and say he was ringing about our fault. He was lucky he interrupted really, I was about to give him an earful. So he went out and connected us up like they were supposed to do in the first place. Nothing is easy. Got home after work, and low and behold the thing actually goes. Kind of.
My heart sank when I saw they sent us a "thomson" modem... I have never had good experiences with them. They have us completely locked out, it has "special" telstra firmware in it which not only doesn't allow you to do anything at all, but it locks out further firmware upgrades so you can't "unlock" it. You can't change your wireless details, it hangs intermittently... no good at all.
Shopping day on wednesday for a decent linksys modem.
AND what is more, the flaming salesman on the telephone when I set it up assured me the plan I was on was uncapped speed. Turns out he was plain lying. Capped at 1500 down and 256 up, which is no good. So, yet another $10 a month out the door to crank it up to full 20mbps. Fingers crossed that + the new linksys will give me stable and usable internet.
So, that was pretty much most of my day, arguing with idiots.
Then in the afternoon we went back to a job that we started a while back, which turned to custard yet again, so the outlook is indeed bleak for the rest of the week as far as that job goes. Getting to play with a bit of wireless linking etc, so that is quite fun though.
Right, it is past my bedtime and I should go to bed as technically I am second on call tonight. Problem is the person who is first on call with the callout phone does not have my telephone number, so I'm not sure how he intends to actually call me out.
At least it means I should get an uninterrupted sleep, unless he comes knocking on my door.
TTFN
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