Nice little earner?
Moving house is stressful enough but service providers, it seems, are determined to compound it. Before relocating, I checked with Sky TV and was told because there was an existing Sky dish with functioning digital connection at my new place, all I’d need to do was take my receiver with me. It turned out to be a long way from ‘plug and play’. When I called Sky to report the lack of service, it transpired there’d been a “disconnect”: I’d been booked in for the fitting of a new dish, although I’ve no need of one. A visit from a technician was the only option. As far as I can tell, he just changed a frequency setting, which could have been done over the phone, ‘helpline’ style. Instead, I’m left holding their bill for the call-out fee. As an existing Mercury Energy customer, I was persuaded by a zealous CSR to stay with them although the new house was on Contact Energy. The electricity supply is fine, but Contact hasn’t acknowledged Mercury’s request for a transfer of the gas account within the specified two working days. Now we risk having it cut off, even though I’d been assured Mercury would sort this out. Spurious reconnection fees seem to be a nice little earner for service providers, and I’d be interested to hear of NZBC readers’ own experiences.
posted by Chris Bell at 5:01 PM
5 Comments:
I found Sky to be great when we moved. telecom however...
We had about a dozen phone jacks in the new house. The only ones that worked were the ones in stupid places. I engaged telecom to liven up the others at the same time I asked them to transfer our number to the new home.
Complications - the old dear who sold to us did not cancel her telecom account, and there was I was told, a fault at the local exchange stopping them doing something important.
Got the old lady to stop her account finally, tel;ecom had 3 contractors on the premises at one stage (no way was one guy going to do the whole job!).
We moved our own Sky receiver, as instructed, it worked for 2 days, then packed up. They're sensitive beasts it seems.
Called Sky - had 2 telecom guys & a Sky dude there that day.
telecom livened up all the jacks except the ones we wanted - that required logging another job. They especially weren't going to liven up the one behind the sky receiver.
So the Sky guy finished their job, livened all the remaining jacks, replaced our faulty receiver box, discovered a loose connection on the satellite dish & for that reason, designated the whole job a fault & we didn't have to pay.
I sent them a nice letter.
We had our phone & broadband & Sky going 3 weeks after we moved in.
Let's not talk about the Gas company, when we needed to move our metre a few feet to make room for a car deck though. Grumpy, expensive, fucks.
I must say that our Sky technician was very good, too, Llew. He supplied an antenna extension cable so we could VCR from the terrestrial channels while watching Sky Digital if we ever need to (we never do), and also provided a broadband filter for the Sky telephone connection. We never book movies direct from our decoder, but he was adamant that the phone line connection had to work, as "Sky may need this in the future", etc. Which makes me wonder what they get up to on Sky subscribers' phone lines, apart from their receiver resets, and of which we're blissfully unaware.
Hey Chris,
I rather think that Contact might, er, here about your comment and, cough, you might find that something gets done.
Not that I would know anything about this or have anything to do with it.
Moving is always stressful.
Always happy to help out a friend.
Hey Sarge, are you saying you sort of know people who know people, in a kinda non-porn 'deep throat' sort of a way...? Anyhow, I can report that the gas is still connected. Not that I'm suggesting you'd know anything about that or have anything to do with it, or anything.
Yeah, the Sky Guy said that they use the phone line to check that the decoder (I called it a receiver because... because... well I probably took too many drugs earlier in my life) is still there.
Dunno where else it might be, although I have considered taking it to SunnyO in the weekends where there is a dish, but no decoder. But then since I heard how frail they are I have decided not to.
Wonder how robust the MySkys are...
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