pumpkinstrokemarrow

Now given that this was not a big deal, rather a little deal, I thought I would email BT rather than phone them. It took me a while fighting through their (generally helpful) broadband help to find a click here to contact us by email button, but find one I did. Take a little trouble to set down the trouble and fire off the email. This being Monday. The BT help desk is on the case and phones me more or less immediately, although the operator rather gave the impression that he phoned first and read the email second. (Not that I can complain. I used to do the very same thing when I was in the world of work. Thought that I could divine what an email was about by looking at it rather than reading it. Sometimes with embarrassing results). In parallel, I get an email acknowledging the call. We go through the usual sort of stuff and decide that I will try changing the splitter (a small white box which plugs into the phone socket in the wall, a BT ADSL MF50. An item of which I have acquired 4 over the years) and that they will send me an email. I change the splitter and demonstrate to my satisfaction that it works, apart from the broadband connection being temporarily broken by an outbound telephone call. The email, apart from reproducing my original query and adding a bunch of call centre stuff, suggests that I try whatever is suggested at the 'slow broadband' part of the broadband help. Which does not strike me as relevant at all. I reply to the email and the operator rings me back.

After further palaver he says that he is going to get an engineer to come and sort me out, an engineer who will ring within 48 hours. Which indeed he does and he does indeed turn up on Thursday morning as agreed. He attaches his toys to my telephone and we establish that outgoing calls are indeed a problem. But, he is no more convinced than the help desk operator that the problem is anything to do with the new telephone. Dodgy splitter he says. Let's try mine. His works. We end up with him installing a new style splitter which, rather than hanging off the socket, is actually screwed into it. This seems to work fine and I can now blog while the BH natters.

Two of the four splitters are now in the dustbin. I keep the other two just in case. The engineer keeps the original top plate to the telephone socket. Perhaps I should have tried all four splitters at the point I was trying two of them. That aside, the engineer explained that the new style splitter was a more robust affair than the old style one and was unlikely to cause a problem. I should never be seeing him again.

So, leaving aside the fact that there was this irritation in the first place, I think the BT response was all that could reasonably be expected. 10 out of 10.