UPC drives me crazy more than any other company here in the Netherlands. Not only is the hardware dreadful (the latest modem has stopped working three times in two months), but the technical and customer service to (try to) resolve problems is at a level that a third world country would be disappointed with.
My latest run-in;
The Internet is vital for me, as I work from home most days, so being offline is like having a missing arm.
On Monday morning the third light on the modem started flashing – not a good sign. Patrick called UPC as I had to go to work. The woman he spoke to seemed to know what she was talking about – diagnosing that the modem was OK and finding out that everyone in our neighborhood was off, so this was a network issue and should be fixed soon. Fortunately we were both working, so didn’t need the internet for several hours, and it was back on again when I arrived home from work.
So far so good.
Later that evening it went off again….
My first call to the helpdesk (which is an 0900 number, and from a mobile costs 35c per minute) went downhill pretty fast;
The woman who answered the phone – giving her name as Maxima Dykstra, without checking anything at all, diagnosed that it was likely to be my coax cable, and that I should swap it out. Clearly I don’t keep spare coaxial cables in the house, so she advised that I needed to go and ask my neighbour to unplug their internet so that I could borrow theirs! Since I don’t know my neighbours well enough (and if I did I wouldn’t put them through that much trouble) it wasn’t an option, so she told me that she could book an engineer’s call, but if the cable was faulty he’d charge me €65!
Obviously I wasn’t happy with this answer, so I asked to speak to her supervisor. She took a minute and (as always) told me that her supervisor was in a meeting (these guys must have a LOT of meetings – I’ve never yet asked for one and found them available).
I told the agent that I wan’t pleased with her service, and she promptly cut me off!
After taking a few deep breaths I dialled again… worked my way through the frustration of a system asking me to speak my postcode and not understading my heavily accented Dutch to get hold of an agent who did put me through to the complaints department promptly.
The guy in the complaints department was Marcel, and was actually quite helpful… and when I say ‘helpful’ I mean that he helped me build up a further 40 minute phone call at 35c per minute, but didn’t unfortuantely manage to help the problem at all. He couldn’t diagnose the issue, couldn’t tell me anything about the terrible Ms Dykstra other than that he would pass my comments back to her supervisor, and in the end had to book an engineer – for 3 days later!… I would have no internet for 3 days, followed by a day having to stay home waiting for the guy to arrive (the most they could define the appointment was between 8am and 1pm).
Clearly it wasn’t a good solution, but I was out of options, so took the appointment.
The next morning the modem was miraculously working again, and I received an automated text message to my phone telling me that they could see the modem was working and so had cancelled my engineer… so much for personal service.
), laptop out of bag, no more than 100ml of liquids (or 3 oz in the US itself, which confuses the hell out of me), and the liquids need to be in bottles labeled less than 100ml, and in a ziplock bag… all that to get on a plane, and I have to believe that true terrorists are better organised than that – surely if you need more than 100ml of liquid for whatever they use it for they’d just get several people to meet up and put all of their 100ml’s together??