Australia Blog

Mobile Office

For the second straight day, Telstra has shown its incompetence. There has been no internet juice flowing to my modem from their cable for over 36 hours. I was on the phone 3 times yesterday and last night and twice again this morning.

First time I was told there was a problem in QLD (nice pin-pointing of the problem, lads), then the next person knew nothing about that. Then I was told by the billing department that applying for a rebate on my account for the inconvenience had nothing to do with them and had to be handled by tech support. Like that makes any sense. Naturally, tech support told me it was a problem for Billing and sent me back.

A call at 10pm revealed they expected the network to be back up by 2am. This morning at 7am, no joy. A call to tech support said 8am on a recorded message. 9am and still nothing. Another call and the revised time is now noon.

Forget that.

So I've packed everything up and am now in a cyber cafe on Adelaide Street in the city. It's a busy place with about 30 terminals, pool table and rocking music. I'm in my own room away from the major noise but can still hear the crack of pool table balls. Rate isn't bad either - $3/hour.

If I had any remaining respect for our telco giant, that has now been irrevocably lost in the wake of this latest debacle.

Good luck to the mug that buys it when it gets privatized.