Symi internet is sometimes (rubbish)
Don’t you just hate it when things you pay good money for don’t do what you were told they would do? It’s the old and thorny subject of the internet connection on Symi again. It may be to do with hubs and areas and all that kind of thing, but ours yesterday got me to the point of wanting to phone up Cosmote and give them an ear bashing of very ungentlemanly proportions – as has been done (politely I should add) in the past. Trying to get anything done online around here sometimes is like trying to run backwards up cliff.
I can imagine the company putting out a message to its Symi customers, something like:
“Your internet connection, that you pay so many Euros for each month and which we promise to give you at, in your case, 4 Mbps, 24 hours a day, will be working for some of the time but, just for fun, we have arranged to have it cut out and go off at the time most inconvenient to you. We won’t warn you about that or be specific, apart from to say, ‘it’ll happen whenever it feels like it.’ We prefer to take you by surprise. Perhaps when you are half way through a Skype call to your agent, or when you are at the last few moments of an episode of ‘House of Cards’ on Netflix, we will simply get the signal to drop out and leave you wondering.” They would then go on:
“As an added bonus, because you are such a loyal customer, having had an account with us for over 12 years now and having never failed to pay a bill on time, we will reward you with some non-drop-out time. At these times you will be able to connect to the internet and find the whizzy super-fast speed that we promised you (a huge 4 Mbps) is actually running at 0.3 Mbps which, as you will know because you are also an astute customer, is slower than the good old days of dial-up. We are offering this service as you are a valued customer.”
And then go on:
“However, if you feel that you are not getting the service we have agreed with you in our contract (4 Mbps for around €30.00 per month) then please feel free to call our helpline. An assistant there will check our end of the system and tell you that everything is fine and has been fixed and there is nothing wrong with the line – you are calling us on your phone after all. If this still does not satisfy (and it is doubtful that it will), then we advise you call the technical people and repeatedly tell them that there is a fault somewhere and you are not getting the service you pay for. They won’t believe you of course and will pass you back to the original call centre where a helpful lady will tell you that there is no fault at our end. In this case we suggest you unplug everything and start again from scratch (again). If that still does not work, then we suggest you try and find another provider. Oh, we forgot, you can’t, not easily, as we have the monopoly on your island. Well, it’s only a small out of the way place anyway, so we are not really worried. Have a nice day.”
Thank you, got that out of my system while waiting for the internet connection to come back on after its 4th time of doing down in one morning, without warning. Assuming that it comes back on between now and the next time I do a blog post, you should get to read this. Oh, you just did, didn’t you? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, I had a tin can stuck to my ear and was listening to a recorded call centre operative at CosmOte via a piece of string. [Looks at view and Neil’s photos and calms down.]
