France Telecom is Useless

I was off line for most of last week due to a problem with my ADSL connection. I'm with Orange (previously Wanadoo) who is owned by France Telecom. I hate having to call people and speak French with them but I had no choice.

The reason I hate calling people was reinforced even more with my first call to Orange. I get pay TV via my ADSL as well as the internet and both went down. When I called Orange I had to speak to either an internet or TV support person. I chose the internet customer support and the woman was a complete nightmare. She refused to speak slower when I asked her which made it difficult to follow all her technical instructions. She insisted the problem was with my computer which I knew wasn't the case seeing my TPS (pay TV) was out too. She said TPS wasn't her area and she couldn't help me with that. She completely missed the point that the problem was related so it was most likely a problem with the line or the LiveBox (modem). She kept repeating that she couldn't help me with the TV and we should get on with connecting the internet. I tried to explain the problem but she just ignored me and went on with her instructions. So I was talking about one thing and she was just continued on with what she wanted to do. Maybe she thought the TV not working at the same time was just a coincidence.

After about 15 minutes of wasting my time fiddling around on my computer, which surprise, surprise, didn't fix the problem, I then got disconnected from her and she didn't call back. I figured she should have called me because otherwise I was going to wait in the queue again even though we had already started on my problem. So at 34 cents a minute that was money really well spent.

So I called back and spoke to someone in the TV customer service section. As soon as I told him both the TV and internet weren't worked he immediately tested the line and found there was a problem with it. He made an appointment for a technician to come out 2 days later (well, what I thought was 2 days later) and it was that simple. I don't what that stupid woman's problem was but at least I finally had a solution.

Two days later I was waiting for the guy who was supposed to arrive at 10:30am. He didn't turn up so I called them at 12pm and 5pm. They told me to be patient and keep waiting. The following day I called again and the guy told me he was arriving that day. So I waited around the previous day for nothing. Ok, I must have misheard the day but why didn't the two people I spoke to let me know I had the day wrong? Was that too much trouble for them?

The wonderful end to this long story is that they guy arrived (an hour late), fixed the problem and then offered to set up my wifi access seeing I had been using a usb commection. I was very happy until he handed me the bill of 149 euros. What! That's not bad for 45 minutes work. I don't see why I should have to pay seeing the problem was with their modem. I don't own the modem I just hire it from them.

At least now I won't be tripping over the wires everyday like I used to. Plus I can watch rubbish French TV again. Great.