BT Suck… Oh Yes They Do

Okay, rant mode active. I’m pretty annoyed with BT at the moment. They have this continually annoying habit of stealing money from me. Alright, so maybe “stealing” is a little harsh, but that’s how it feels. Let me tell you why.

A couple of weeks back, BT posted my lovely online bill for our phone line (Broadband bill is separate). On this bill, BT have listed all the wonderful ins and outs, as shown below:

Bill period: 28 Sep 2007-27 Dec 2007

Credit balance (inc VAT): £25.28
Usage charges: £0.23
Your benefits: -£1.52
Rental charges: £33.00
One-off charges: £3.00
Total this period: £34.72
Brought Forward: £8,671.85
Payments: -£217.99
Credit balance (inc VAT): £25.28

Ok, bearing in mind that we are all students, and this is my first BT account ever, let’s just go over what isn’t working or doesn’t make sense here:

1. I have paid off the bill for this period, yet they still decide to take £60 from my account and add it to the “Payments”
2. They mention credit balance twice, and both times it doesn’t make sense or add up. I should be at least £60 in credit, as they didn’t need to take that. If you exclude the brought forward figure, £36.23 – £1.52 = £34.72 -217.99 is not = £-25.28 >: (
3. This is my first account with BT, and we have only been living here since September 07, yet they want me to fork out £8,671.85. All I can say to that is, “What. The. ” Yeah you get the picture. Even if I had over £8,600, I wouldn’t be spending it on a damn phone bill.
4. What’s worse, is they modified my direct debit and took £178.50 out of my account yesterday, so I was not a happy bunny. In my anger and protest, I went to my internet banking and cancelled the direct debit. They won’t be “stealing” any money from me anymore >: ( If they have a problem, they can call me up for a change.

So I phoned them up, went through the automated options, waited over half an hour and finally got through to a woman who said I have been passed through to the wrong department, because hers is Residential Billing and she can’t access my account, because the account number starts with GB. I asked her why, and then revelled in how poor the excuse was – She told me that the accounts with GB were on a different system, and when they made the system, they didn’t realise that they wouldn’t be able to access GB accounts.

Ever heard of a network darling? And I’m sure that I’m a resident of a residential area with residential broadband. Hmmph. So she gave me a different number to call, which luckily I got put through to someone straight away and yes, it was a foreign call person. “Great,” I thought. Now, I am quite prejudice when it comes to foreign call centres, but this Indian guy was quite helpful, could actually understand what I was saying and put a service request for someone to look at the account, and I should wait 24-48 hours for a phone call, otherwise call again with my reference. So I am half suspicious, and half sitting in anticipation, waiting for this stupidity to be sorted.

In other more important news, I applied to Intel in Swindon with my CV etc. and I re-applied to Microsoft for the fun of it. What’s even better, I applied with the same application, same e-mail, same everything and, when I received an e-mail back from the recruitment firm on behalf of Microsoft, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my application was successful, I had entered the next stage and can expect to hear from them in the form of an informal telephone interview. Score.

It pays to be annoyed with a recruitment company rejecting you and trying to annoy them by applying again, especially when the bottom of the rejection e-mail had “THIS IS AN AUTOMATED E-MAIL. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS ADDRESS.”. Foolish.

Some may have noticed the change in appearance to my blog. I wanted something new for the New Year. I chose this one, due to it’s clean lines, and it’s nice light blue colour You may also have noticed that there is now a section showing my photos on Flickr. I chose to put this is, because my phone can automatically upload photos directly to Flickr, and I can them link them, if I need to, on my blog posts. A lot easier than transferring them to my PC, uploading them, then getting the linking info and typing it into my post! Finally, I also added my blog’s statistics, because I have reached over 1,150 hits, which I thought is pretty cool for a blog which, until now, has had little publicity. I received about 140 hits in two days from being featured at WOM World Oh and I’ve remembered that I can use the “Read More” feature, so I don’t end up with stupidly long posts ^_^