I arrived at my parents' house this afternoon armed with a load of washing, a car in desperate need of a good wash, and most importantly, some flowers for mum for mother's day.  This officially makes me the Best Daughter Ever   yay.  It has since been pointed out that I have never given her flowers before..  oh well.

I've been having some fun with ISPs this week...

the short story is that my broadband is now on order and should be activated by the end of next week.
the long story involves much more ranting

My old isp was EFH.  When we signed up with them they were very good - excellent support, no connection problems, nothing.  I figured I may as well stick with them, especially as that way I could avoid a £50 charge for cancelling before 12 months.

So on Wednesday I went on their website to order broadband for the flat.  Existing customer, enter your username/password... which I did.  Website says "Invalid login".  hmm, ok then.  I tried a few more times and gave up, figuring that I'd phone them up instead as they got taken over a few months ago and maybe logins had changed or something.  Only apparently they're having issues with their shiny new outsourced callcentre, so I got a nice recorded message telling me to ring back another time.  fine, whatever..

Thursday.. I go back on the website.  Only it's been replaced by a "no website configured at this address" message...  great.  At this point I start thinking that maybe I should look elsewhere.   Especially when I found a lot of bad things being said about 186k - the new parent company - and how EFH have really gone downhill since the takeover.
Quick panicky search of other ISPs, and I place an order elsewhere (eclipse, if you really want to know).

Friday morning... time to cancel the old account.  EFH website is half back up - the front page has a big angry ASP error, but the rest is ok.  Support pages list several email addresses, all @efhbroadband.com.  So I send an email.  Which bounces.  As do the two I send to the other addresses listed.  great.

In the meantime I've had an email from eclipse saying the order can't progress because BT have said there's already broadband on the phone line.  argh.

Friday lunchtime - mostly spent on hold.  EFH made me listen to really bad quality Enya and then some other depressing rubbish which I could barely hear.  Then when I finally got through, I was a little more rude that I perhaps needed to be...  Get told a different email address - this time @186k.co.uk.  I pointed out that maybe they should update the website, as all @efh emails are bouncing.  Support blokey tells me the website does say the correct thing.  Er, no it doesn't.  

He also told me that I didn't have to cancel just because I was moving house - I could sign up again and transfer the account over... At that point I started getting quite arsey, and told him exactly why I wouldn't be doing that.  I felt a bit bad, because it's not like one bloke in the callcentre in India can do anything about it, but really...  If you're moving all your support emails to another domain, the least you could do is set up a forwarder from the old addresses!  Or an autoresponder - anything rather than just let it bounce!  oh yeah, and update your website, you fools.

grr.  But it's all sorted now, I hope.  

tags: flat grr