28 June 2008

Shafted by Deutsche Telekom...

I had heard, of course, that the telephone and cable companies in Germany were fat and lazy and incompetent and I am sad to say that my current experience is bearing that out. We had chosen DT partially in the expectation that they would actually have follow through and wew were willing to pay more for that. But even though we had an appointment for telephone and cable and fast DSL hook-up this past week, the time of our appointment came and passed.

The German had taken the day off specifically to combine moving and this appointment (and this will definitely be the last time we move ourselves--- the work is backbreaking and exhausting) and when they did not arrive he called them. Much discussion later, the problem turned out to be 'a system error'. That means, of course, that DT does not need to make any effort to deal with the result of their error. Oh, excuse me, not their error, the system's error. The German was pretty unhappy with the concept and went up several layers, followed by a trip to the store where he had made the original appointment (which was incorrectly done by an employee) and the manager there assured him that a new appointment would be scheduled as quickly as possible, and certainly not even a week later.

We have a new appointment for two weeks from now. Right now, I am using the German's work computer (and it's quite difficult to use both the German keyboard and the wonky touchstick) and his UMTS card. It is very slow. So I won't be on-line much this week. Maybe I can catch up later...

2 comments:

Gardner said...

Wow! good luck. We are switching phone and internet service in a few weeks. I am planning for the worse.

Lynda said...

Dosen't seem to matter what country - telecommunications are just a pain. We have a landline, but can't call OS or mobiles - basically it is useless, mobile call charges are really cheap here so everyone uses it - and we get so many wrong numbers it is madness.