After the utter debacle of getting a Samsung box back in April (
thread here) that ended after a week with intervention from this forum (thankyou Nemesis) and a phonecall from Alan Grant himself (swoon) I had slowly brought my stress levels under control and was approaching normalcy (for me) when ...
Hmmm. Why isn't Prem Plus on? It's on my upstairs box - the Samsung with 2MB Broadband - in the small room on the small portable TV. But downstairs, the widescreen TV, the old box, the home cinema system ... apparently I'm not subscribed. Oh bother or words to that effect.
I've just got off the phone with Steven from Swansea Call Centre, ext 4345. Here's what's happened:
When my upstairs Pace box was replaced with a Samsung we had the service for the Pace disconnected. Sounds fine. But ... NTL apparently disconnected the downstairs Pace service and not the upstairs one. Now, you may be thinking surely I'd notice something like no TV downstairs but, actually, we've had uninterrupted service downstairs - full package, sports and movies - with the fewest number of forced reboots in any period at all that I can remember. Halcyon days of television experience shattered by today's episode. Hence our not noticing we'd been diconnected. Now when we ordered Prem Plus it apparently got activated on our upstairs Samsung and possibly on an old Pace box broken up for spares somewhere in the hinterlands. But not downstairs where we want it.
You might imagine that all it would take would be: reactivate the downstairs box, send the signal, couple of presses on a computer.
I imagined that.
But that's not the case. It appears to be something that cannot be fixed this weekend and will - oh this gets better - require me phoning to disconnect/reconnect on Monday. Me. Not NTL doing this automatically. Me. There's not a single person working over the weekend who can do this apparently and it seems that even if there were it would still require more action on my part to call another number to disconnect anyway. Me. I report the problem and the solution is ... report it to someone else.
But wait! There's more!
Whose fault is it that I can't watch Prem Plus in my comfy recliner, with 5.1 surround, on wide-o-vision? Whose fault is it that I'm going to miss the first several pay-per-view games in my living room and will need to settle for cramped conditions and 14" viewing trauma? Which - and this may be a leading question - cable television provider reckons that this doesn't in any way constitute a loss of service and that compensation will not be forthcoming? Not that I expected much; a pound a game after all. But the principle, the principle ...
So ... Monday I get to look forward to phoning and getting put on hold and getting passed around and getting confused responses from people who've no idea what my problem is and being put on hold again and getting assured things will be fine when I get home from work. And it might be. But you just know a messed-up bill is just around the corner don't you?
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