Saturday, May 22, 2010

Lousy, lousy, lousy Bell

I suppose I should have expected it, since it's been some time since I've had any significant problems with Bell Canada service.  A while back, after numerous significantly frustrating ordeals, I gave up on them and switched over to Rogers for a year, but after the initial offer from them was up, Bell offered me a deal on phone and internet service which was too good to pass up, plus it didn't come with any contractual obligations.  And I have to admit - for the last year or so, I haven't had any major complaints.  In fact, if I ever needed to contact them, it seems they have rearranged their customer service department so you can actually talk to a real person (not Emily) within a reasonable amount of time who usually speaks decent English and doesn't sit at a desk halfway around the world. 
After today, though, I realized that Bell has not given up on its infamously and unacceptably lousy customer service, and is in fact working hard on stacking blocks onto its monumental tower of stupidity.  I called them earlier this week to arrange the moving of our telephone and internet service to the new house, which I asked to be set up for June 21.  This call took almost an HOUR to complete, with both kids screaming in the background at various times.  Glad to have that phone call out of the way, I started working on the rest of my infinitely long to-do list.  This morning, I tried to make a phone call and it didn't seem to go through - I assumed it was a bad number and didn't think anything more of it until later in the morning when the internet stopped working.  Strange... I went downstairs to reset the modem.  On my way back upstairs, I realized with a foreboding feeling that today was May 21...exactly one month before June 21... I'll bet that Bell tried to move our phone line today instead of next month. I had received a confirmation email about the moving of service, and it was definitely set up for June 21 but you never know what kind of mistakes this company is capable of. 
Sure enough, after calling Bell on the cell phone (which we reserve for emergencies) and having a quick chat with Emily, she confirmed that our service move was in progress and she assured me service would be up and running - at the new address - by 5 pm.  I got a hold of a customer service person and explained the situation - she apologized and promised that service would be restored to our current address within two hours.  Four hours later, service still wasn't back so I called again - and I was assured it would be restored by 5:00.  Guess what - at 5:00 it still didn't work!!  I called them from ZELLERS and chewed them out (the second time I called, anyways, since the first time I called I was hung up on), demanding that someone come and give me back my phone line TONIGHT, because I do not want to have no phone over a long weekend!  He told me that the phone service was working at my house and since I was at Zellers, since my phone didn't work at home, I couldn't very well check it, could I.  I told him to have someone give me a call at 9:00 to confirm it was working.  Aaaaand once I returned home, guess what, the phone still didn't work.  Surprise.  However, there was a dial tone at the NEW house so I guess Mike will be getting a call there at 9:00 (he's doing some work there this evening).  How stupid can you get??  Yes, we might have possession of the house already but what if we didn't?  Bell would have directed all our phone calls to someone else's house.  They'd better restore my phone service VERY soon, because this is just infuriating me!! 

UPDATE:  Although the phone is still not hooked up here and we have no dial tone, for some odd reason the internet has started working again... if you have a hard time getting a hold of us this might be why...  In the meantime I still have to figure out where I should go to use the phone to chew someone out over there at Bell...

1 comment:

Danielle said...

My deepest sympathies my dear sister - i know some of your pain since Emily/Bell once disconnected our phone because we "asked" them to do that... apparently we lived in a place somewhere near Ottawa at the time (first thing i heard about that since i was calling them from our basement apartment in Hannon...funny that!)
Hope you're sorted out soon!
Love ya lots!