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Went to the 'National Freelancers Day' do in that there London last night. It was very good indeed. Shappi Khorsandi was the star guest, and she was excellent. Plenty of free booze too
Am now WFH (working from Hotel) this morning - am torn between NG or bed this afternoon.
Shopping done, so that's one less thing. Broadband still isn't fixed. The service status page says it's almost done, but there's no sign of it being anything other than borked from where I am
Trying to decide whether to have another coffee. I don't want to imbue myself with the illusion of having loads of energy, then finding I've nothing to do :roll eyes:
Virgin Media in full-on incompetent feckwit mode today
Following the "Report a fault" trail on their website led me to the option to use online chat. Vaguely hoping this might be more efficient than phoning, I gave it a try. I opened with the fact that things were broken.
Some bloke, who appeared to be handling multiple chats judging by the inordinately long pauses between responses, managed to get through the business of verifying that I knew my own phone number, but then announced that he couldn't help as he was from the billing team, and I should start a new chat with the technical team to report the fault. He posted a link to the page from which I should start this new chat. It was, of course, the very page that had connected me to him in the first place
I gave up, and phoned them. I got through fairly quickly, but the bloke just got me to turn it off and on again, claiming that from his end he'd be able to see how it was connecting. This, I have no doubt, is exactly the same as the automated test on the website that I'd already run myself. And, like that, he couldn't see a thing and went for the default "send an engineer out" response.
At least the engineer's coming tomorrow, rather than a week next Tuesday, as usually happens. But I've been over the router status pages (http://192.168.100.1/ if you're with Virgin Media and want to see your own) and this is the same as a fault that's appeared several times in the past. It always happens after somebody's been working on the box in the street, it always happens after midnight, and in the past it's always fixed itself miraculously sometime after midnight the following night. It's something to do with network access permissions somehow getting screwed up in some way, leading to a temporary block on the line similar to those they put on if you haven't paid your bill. But for some reason they can't ever see it from their end.
So I now suspect that the problem will vanish in the small hours of the morning, leading me to cancel the engineer; and then the same thing will happen next time.
The worst thing is, there's no alternative to using them (ADSL is laughable compared to fibre), and they know it, so they can get away with this crap service.
I don't even know why I put it off until there's loads of it; it only takes thirty seconds to stuff it in the machine and start it, and a couple of minutes to take it out again. But I can't be bothered, and end up with piles of the stuff
I was hoping to get the new iMac to work digging into creating apps for the new Apple TV today - hence buying one yesterday, which was delivered this morning. But Xcode is 4.3GB, and I don't think it's practicable to download that using the 4G dongle
Just had confirmation from VM on Twitter that their system updates happen between midnight and 3am, which explains why whenever I have a problem like this, it arises and then fixes itself around those times
Not sure why they expect me to pay for the ~24 hours without service between the two events
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