Lots of monkeys with typewriters

Well, we know the old saying about lots of monkeys and typewriters and somehow one coming up with the complete works of Shakespear...

It seams like that with broadband fault reports.

Just occasionally we have cause to report a lot of identical faults, and last night was one such case. What is tellinge is these are all identical fault reports but get a huge range of different responses!

A handful identified that the fault was a major outage and even listed the reference for incident report, but many of these sent back to us for "retest" even though the incident is not closed. A small number did not.

Most came up with various excuses. Various "no fault found". Suggestions of checking drivers on the PC. Suggestions of a special engineer being sent to the end user. And so on.

Not one that was sent back for retest suggested that they had in fact fixed the fault!

To be honest, if you just said "here are a set of responses and repair actions, pick one at random" you would have a better fault system than they have now. By keeping sending teh fault back you eventually hit the correct repair action at random.

Some responses just made crap up. They said the end user was maximising their uplink... WTF! They were not. In fact, in there cases, we have reported the issue on lines that were off line, so a line off-line for the last 10 days was allegedly "maximimising their uplink".... As if that was an explanation even if true!

I have had to explain that LYING to us for the purpose of reducing the chance of paying out on the service level guarantee is actually CRIMINAL FRAUD and they could be reported to the police... Saying stuff they know is untrue so they can clear a fault back to us is CRIMINAL FRAUD. I am so sick of it now. By the way, SLG is around £1.50 on a line taking over 40 hours to fix in this case, so not a lot ut still, its fraud to lie to avoid paying it.

if only they could just do things right, and fix faults, and not make up crap...

We'll see. I have offered consultancy!