IT’s early evening on Wednesday 15 May and I am disturbed from watching ‘The Chase’ on TV to attend to a courier delivery van at my front gate.
I sign for a box which contains a wireless telephone and router.
He has as much idea of what it is for as I do, which is zero.
‘Sorry, I just do distribution of these things,’ he says apologetically.
Next day, I have no telephone or internet connection.
On logging the complaint I am told I no longer have an ADSL line (they are being removed because of copper theft) and I am now the proud owner of a mobile service that outperforms the trusty old landline by far.
‘Just look in the box for the instructions,’ says anonymous.
I do just that and, hey presto! the new phone is working perfectly.
Not so the internet…and it will be four weeks before the red light literally changes to green (it hasn’t done so yet but for the umpteenth time we have been told it will happen ‘today’).
For a newspaper editor with a team of journalists who must constantly stay in contact, this is nothing short of disastrous; not to mention a wife who has a small online business working from home.
We’ve had four weeks of preparation for what hell might be like.
More than a dozen calls to the Telkom fault numbers over a fortnight, which means waiting for ages for some person to eventually answer the call, listen to the story, ask us to hold again and then come back saying the fault is somewhere else in the system that they can’t sort out.
Two of them had the decency to apologise, saying they have not received training in the wireless system – and all were very polite, I must add.
At least four promised they had ‘escalated our complaint to a higher level’, which I learned simply means a higher degree of ineffectiveness.
We also received the dubious good news a couple of times that all our issues would be resolved ‘within 24 hours’. They just didn’t say which 24 hours.
Oh, and we also visited the local Telkom shop four times, even taking the router with us in case it was our own ignorance in setting it up that was the problem – and given my level of IT skills that was my first guess.
They, too, were very polite but unable to get the thing going.
It was eventually determined (I use that word generously) that the SIM card in the router was faulty.
It wasn’t, as a SIM swop revealed.
That one was trumped by the report that the SIM card had not been activated.
The activation was duly done at the start of week four. By the way, the Activation Department does not work on evenings or weekends.
Still no green light on the router.
Aha! There was no data – that was the problem!
Strange one that. The installation comes with some data, we were told, and we obviously could not have used any.
Even after my wife bought a whole bunch more data, still nothing after two days.
Enough was enough: as we entered the threshold of an internet-less month, we negotiated a different service provider.
Within one hour, literally, we had home internet! Wi-Fi, nogal.
Phase two of the Great Telkom Battle has now begun after closing the account. Heaven knows how Telkom will deal with the end of our contract and how to bill (or reimburse) us.
However, I will keep their new router in storage as a bargaining tool in lieu of all the service I was denied, the riding around and the data costs it took to keep business alive via our cell phones.
Ironically, I left Telkom many years ago as a Senior Telecommunications Technician. The place obviously went down steadily since my departure.
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