Financial Journalist

Finance Week, Gerry O’Kane, 23 May 2008

Harry, my FD mate who has moved on to talking to his red cabbage, told me it was the most stressful three weeks of his life. “And I’ve been through two divorces,” he emphasised.

It wasn’t a merger, or pay review or job interview or a new baby; it was getting BT to transfer his phone line and broadband to a new home. “And it wasn’t cheap,” he hissed.

You see, he has my sympathies since I’m going through a similar process myself: no communication, bills without explanatory notes, wrong equipment delivered, help-lines and web-pages that don’t exist, even the registration page that refused to recognise my (BT) landline number and stopped the registration process dead. Then there were the shirty and ignorant technical people in Bangalore.

Ms Shirty

I had followed Ms Shirty’s technical advice precisely (Outlook was objecting about connecting to BT Broadband in spite of numerous hours installing and reinstalling BT’s software) but the particular button she required was not there. Somehow that was my fault but please bear in mind that I started as computer journalist in 1984 even met Bill Gates that year and have been working with PCs ever since. I even started using the internet in 1994 and worked for an internet company!

The final straw for her was my refusal to allow her take control of my computer from India. Yeah, right and I fully trust you, especially since you’re trying to pretend that you’re in Birmingham. I don’t even trust BT.

Scottish burr

Eventually I complained to Helen, the UK complaints telephonist, who had that soothing Scottish burr and said I shouldn’t put up with it and agreed that BT had cocked up my equipment.

When I told Harry about my progress he snorted, said something to his leek and just bought me another house vodka and coke.

Well since then a delivery that I had no idea was coming turned up with no letter, a bin-liner for the existing router (no letter), nor has there been progress on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) issue which has to be authorised manually before I can get email or any of the other numerous esoteric problems that spring out at me and my two computers like Tigger greeting Pooh.

Baseball bat to wireless router

I’ve now given up ever expecting it to work smoothly and realise why the CD wouldn’t run on the laptop or anything operate correctly: I’d signed an 18 month contract and they have been immune to screwing me on my landline rental for years, so why expect anything new? The only thing is my girlfriend is fed up with me swearing at the computer so much.

Now what makes all this worse is that Hanif Lalani recently won finance director of the year from a FTSE 100 company in a CBI co-sponsored competition. Nauseatingly Lalani is the FD of BT and was commended for making “a considerable impact on the company”.

I’ll have to start talking to Harry’s cabbage otherwise the only “considerable impact” I’ll have with BT will be baseball bat to my wireless router.

Gerry O’Kane Finance Week 7 July 2008

Just as I started to write this Avon and Somerset police announced that another pensioner had been the victim of a distraction burglary by someone pretending he was from British Telecom.

My heart goes out to the 83-year old, but she must only remember telephone companies being owned by the Post Office because if anyone approached my doorstep and says they’re from BT, I’m reaching for the SRAW/Eryx (my personal anti-tank weapon) stashed behind the door.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, BT actually trying to approach you personally is so rare that you figure there’s something wrong. Secondly, since my transfer to their broadband my life has been less than smooth.

The latest has been yet another demand for money with absolutely no clarification for what exactly they were charging. They expected me to cough up £95 with no breakdown of the expenses: is this a style of accounting that Hanif Lalani the firm’s CFO believes is a good one? This is not the first time this has happened: last time it was some direct debit but didn’t again say exactly what they were billing for.

Harry, my FD mate who likens dealing with BT to going through the pain of divorce, is rubbing his hands at the idea of a consultancy on implementing financial tracking systems at BT. “I could invoice them without telling them what it was for, that’d pay for replacing the brassicas!” he trumpets. (He hasn’t quite got over the Great Brassica Slaughter of 2008 when a concerted attack of commando rabbits took out over 2000 various members of the genus known collectively as cabbages, in two fields in 24 hours. We’re sending them to the States to train up Delta Force.)

I had tried to call BT before the latest bill, but it was a maze of phone options that took 15 minutes before you were put in a queue and told how valuable you were as a customer. By this stage your brain is hurting because if you were a valued customer they’d answer the bloody phone.

This time I persevered. Success, someone answers. Headache goes. Headache returns: I was back in a Bangalore.

This irritates me because (a) the money for my over-priced bills is paying to take jobs out of the UK, (b) they have no idea of why we all hate BT and (c) you know that it is pointless venting your spleen on these clueless victims of outsourcing gone mad, who continue to dream of taking their double-first in Brain Surgery to somewhere sensible.

Anyway I was told that part of the bill was from my BT Option 75a, which I don’t use because I get better rates from my third party call supplier who is forced to use the BT landline.

But he had no idea what the “fine” of £2.75 was for, nor what was going on with the broadband charges, oh yes it was on there. I had to talk to the broadband department which was either in Delhi or three desks away. I then went through the palaver of phone numbers, customer billing numbers, post code, inside leg measurements, all over again.

This time I was told to go online and get a break-down of my bill, because she couldn’t be bothered to tell me. Well she didn’t say this, but did tell me to look it up for myself.

My voice did go up an octave at this point, with me arguing that since I was expected to pay them money they could at least break down what it was for and sod their paperless billing since they’re about as interested in the environment as telling me what they’re billing me for.

She put me on hold and went to speak to her supervisor because evidently she didn’t know either.

It appears I was now paying three months in advance for something-broadband and apparently I was meant to know this, the half price offer too, the fine (still don’t know what for), VAT and something towards African national debt, but it was me who had to add up what was happening on the landline side too…

The last time I had something like this was a week before I got thrown out off the National Union Of Journalists for having the temerity of asking what I had on account with the union and into which charge band they had now put me, since I had just joined the BBC. When they didn’t tell me, I refused to pay. Then they told me I was blacklisted.

That saved me a fortune over the years.

What staggers me is that BT pretends to be technology company - yet two departments can’t communicate. It espouses good value: yet it keeps hiking prices including charging me for not allowing a multinational corporation with monopolistic tendencies to have access to my bank account and remove whatever cash it sees fit. It certainly sees no need to tell me what I’m paying for.

Is this how a company retains customers, is this what is meant by improved reporting, is this good corporate governance?

If they didn’t have an effective monopoly I’d be one less customer.

No wonder the company’s preliminary pre-tax fourth quarter results were up 3% at £715 million. Oh no, my brain is melting, my brain is melting…