Will Morgan

That’s it. I’ve had it with Virgin Media, and when I get a stable income, I will be switching away from them. What makes me steam with anger is Virgin Media’s latest approach to its service and business ethics.

I’m not a bandwidth hog: I stay away from excessive use of YouTube and torrent downloading. However, apparently today when downloading a few episodes of my favourite podcasts I was filtered into the top 5% of Virgin Media’s user list in terms of bandwidth usage. I have no idea how this statistic came about or was calculated, but either way, I’m not happy at all. Here is what Virgin Media has to say about “traffic management”, known to people who don’t use corporate bullshit-terms as capping, or shaping.

My family doesn’t use much bandwidth at all, and between both myself and my sister’s computers (and on occasion, my laptop also) we never have any issues with hogging bandwidth or slow speeds - hence us being on the 2MB “Broadband M” package. We as a family have been paying £17.99/month for internet access since 2003, first through NTL. Our speed was 128kbps download, which in today’s terms is snail-speed slow. But NTL, being the good company that they were, decided to upgrade us when they were able to - for free - with no change to the monthly payment amount.

Throughout our dealings with NTL, we never had any issues technologically or administratively. We paid them the money, they gave us excellent service with no fuck ups or otherwise. This was until Virgin Media took over a few years ago. Since then, everything has gone downhill.

Our first run in with Virgin’s rude and extortionate billing department was when they “forgot” to acknowledge the direct debit order that was paying the money monthly and they decided to write us letters threatening termination of service, baliff intervention and other nasty things like ruining our credit histories. After several letters going back and forth from the cretins in their many administrative offices, we finally managed to get through to them on the phone. This was roughly 2 week’s worth of hassle and unnecessary stress. Smooth.

Our second run in was when we were surprisingly upgraded to a 4MB package. I noticed this and thought “hey, cool, Virgin’s finally given us a free upgrade again!” I was wrong. Virgin decided to blame their “new billing system” on an accidental upgrade - and started issuing the same notices as before, threatening legal action, baliffs and termination of service. It turns out we were owing them an extra amount of money more per month.

This time they actually cut us off, which needless to say, pissed everyone inside the household off as there was, in our opinion and to our knowledge, no reason for them to do this. Again we sent them letters and telephone calls back to their offices, and they neglected to do anything about it. Shows how efficient and great communication is within this company!

So we rang up (”a place really far away well known for curry and arranged marriages”) their support service and they informed us we’d been cut off. They referred us to billing. We finally managed to get through their thick skulls that we’d never upgraded and had infact been paying them the money we believed was required for the service. Of course, this abrupt termination of service for no justified reason constituted breach of contract. When we started using those terms they pulled their fingers out and had us reconnected, albeit at the slower speed, in 30 minutes.

Roughly 2 hours and £20 worth of long distance 0845 number calls later, it was all over. Phew.

Their third sin is around about the time there was a fire at the back of our house. When NTL originally installed broadband for us 5 years ago, they routed a cable round the back of our house, above the wall. Of course plastic coated cables don’t react nicely to flames, so they were melted and pretty nicely cooked.

We called up that place really far away again, and they told us that they’d notified the technical department and they would be coming in a week to fix the mess with the appropriate parts.

One week had passed, and said technical team turned up late without the necessary tools to fix the problem. Not their fault of course - the stupid woman in support didn’t really pass on their details, did she? Probably not. He found a way around the problem though - luckily there was another cable that could be brought through the front of the house into the living room as a temporary fix. He said that they’d be sending another team to come and reinstall it through the first floor at the back at a later date.

Obviously when I got back from college, I spotted that all I had to do was move the modem downstairs and problem was solved. The only downside was the obvious issue that now one of our computers was unable to connect to the internet as there wasn’t enough ethernet wire length to reach up the stairs and into the back. So that cost us an extra £60 in hardware for a wireless router and WLAN card, as we weren’t in a position to wait another few weeks for Joe the communications technician to come ill-advised from New Delhi with the wrong parts. We called up Virgin Media and let them know that this wouldn’t be necessary any more and no longer required any more technical support.

Those few weeks passed, and of course, the techies arrived due to Virgin Media’s pathetic excuse for internal communications. What’s more - Virgin Media had the cheek to try billing us for their own fuck up. We politely rang them up to let them know that they could go and fuck themselves, and they did.

So here are my dealings with Virgin Media. But it gets more juicy than that: would you guys like to hear about Virgin Media’s new CEO’s stance on net neutrality? Well, here it is, begin quote! “A load of bollocks.” Well Mr. Neil Berkett, you might make me read your flashy advertisements advertising your fancy space-wire, but if you’re going to try and transform its use from an information superhighway into a modern-day gold mine, I no longer want to pay yours, or any of your employee’s salaries.

Why, you ask? Because the BBC fucks with people.

Yeah, so for anyone who still reads here (read: Googlebot) here’s what’s been going on lately:

• Due to the credit crunch, freelance work has been slowly suffocated along with any sort of income I’m receiving.
• I applied for a job at the BBC, and they offered it to me. Then they took it away.
• As a result of this, back to full time job hunting it is for me.

Wow. There was once a time when my freelance career reigned supreme, bringing in a nice chunk of money in per month that I could save up and maintain myself with (read: buy my own food.) I had a few jobs lined up, sort of mid-length jobs that involve a bit of PHP and MySQL, the rest mostly UI development - with an estate agent company. As most people have read or head in the past few months, some inner city estate agents are now selling houses with 0% commission in order to get some business. Ouch.

Well obviously,  some things must go surplus in times like these, so I was politely informed those jobs didn’t need doing anymore, for the time being. Fair enough, see you in a few years time. Any sort of work I was getting through CSS Slicing Guide has simply vapourized over the past few months, which brought me in some income.

With this in mind, I started looking for jobs at the BBC, with recommendation from a friend or two. I applied with little hope of getting in, as I knew I was probably going to be competing with people who have my experience AND a master’s degree in something relevant. But still, it was worth a try. I didn’t hear anything from them for a few months, so I calmly assumed that they found someone who had filled that role. How wrong was I…

So between my job application and a month or two of silence from the BBC’s recruitment department, I took on a rather challenging freelance project that would give me something to do, and perhaps fund a few driving lessons for good measure. Just as I was starting the project up and getting some ideas into the cloud, I received an email from the BBC, letting me know I was shortlisted for an interview.

Fucksticks, I thought, as obviously I couldn’t take on this huge project and work full time simultaneously. My confidence had been kick started, so I decided to bite the bullet and consider pulling out of the project - much to the discontent of my client, who I’d spent a day with on location getting to see how things worked. Not to mention some of the work I had already done.

So I went to the interview, and one week later I was told I had the job. They gave me a starting date: November the 3rd, and a nice salary, and told me to come in at 10am on the day. Great. Now time to actually cancel the project after a few weeks of it being on ice.. done.

“Wahey!” I thought. Spend the next week or so finishing off whatever short term contracts I had going, go on holiday for a week, and then come back refreshed and ready to start.

A week later, the HR woman got in contact with me asking for references specific to the roles I had listed on my CV. “That’s funny”, I thought, as obviously it’s a little farfetched offering someone a job and then asking for references later. Well, not listing Johnathan Ross or Russell Brand as any of my references I thought I’d have nothing to worry about. So I tracked down satisfactory references for my roles, and sent them over. I offered to give more, and let them know to contact me if they had any problems with them. I also asked for clarification about a firm job offer (as they offered it over the phone.) Believe it or not, out of the two separate emails I sent, two days apart, only one of them happened to “get through” to Selina Begum, HR employee.

Cue Friday 31st of October, the last working day before I was due to start, conveniently close to the end of office hours. Ring ring (Unknown number is calling!), pick up phone. It’s Selina and Manjit Rekhi (one of the panel members who was interviewing me on the day.) Apparently there was a problem with my references, and after one week, and one email clearly stating: “if you have any problems, let me know so I can fix them”, they neglected to bother calling me up and giving me any sort of chance. Instead, they told me they were pulling my job application, letting me know it was a provisional offer based on satisfactory references. Hang on, they never told me that.

So I put the phone down, pretty shocked, after the conversation I’d just had at such short notice. After 5 minutes of calm and contemplative thinking, I decided to give Selina a call to try and resolve things. Interestingly, nobody answered the phone, so I left a message. I then sent an email, letting her know about this message, about 30 minutes later. It was almost the end of office hours, so I presumed I’d hear back from her sometime the following week.

It’s now the 12th November. Still nothing.

So there you have it guys, my dealings with the BBC and another reason why you should stop paying your TV license to pay these clowns’ salaries.

Upon speculation, I think that they probably have hired a friend or relative at short notice. They knew my age, and probably thought they could take me for a ride and kick me in the teeth afterwards. Unfortunately for them I have a backbone, and a relatively unoccupied father who knows the law, who also happens to socialise with solicitors and other people who know the law.

Time to cause some hassle. I’m expecting them to lie through their teeth, but I have nothing to lose, apart from any chance of future employment with these asshats. But I think I’ll give that a miss, don’t you?