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Babylonian Case Study: BT Broadband
MatSalted
Posts: 1 Newbie
Hi
This morning I got a quarterly ISP/Phone bill for £400. Of that, £310 was for “Broadband Usage” as deemed by BT Broadband’s fair use policy. This is an immense and totally unexpected bill for three months’ landline internet usage.
I was sure I was unlimited, apparently not. I made a mistake in that. But that is not my issue.
The issue is that BT Broadband hadn’t tried to contact me at my phone, home or Gmail even though the latter two were regularly spammed with all kinds of offers from them. Surely they should have “warned me” that, after ten years, for the first time, they were going to slap a £300+ charge on me completely out of the blue?
I was shocked and shaking at this corporate audacity.
I rang BT Broadband up and spoke to someone in India who gave me the first line of fob-off; she told me that it was their “fair use” policy and there was nothing, really, I could do. She assured me me she thought it was fair. I mentioned Ofcom and she told me right away that Ofcom was aware of their “fair use” policy – ie don’t bother contacting them. For every protestation and question she had an answer until, in the end, she performed a typical “Babylonian Buck Pass” by giving me another number to call.
I called and spoke to Linda in England.
Linda was in the Fair Use department and seemed almost caring. She told me that she was sorry I was so shocked and upset by the charges but she did insist that they were fair. I explained that I had absolutely no warning about the imminent charges which would have prompted an immediate change of account by me. She insisted that BT sent emails to my BT email address and thus it was fair that I was charged.
In made it very clear to her that I didn’t check that account, nor had I, nor should I.
We agreed that:
1) I demonstrably hadn’t checked that email address for years, if at all.
2) They had my Gmail account.
But then Linda seemed to make up from nowhere the idea that they could only send warnings to my BT account and not my Gmail account. This fact was not compatible with the fact that BT Broadband regularly send me promotional and other emails to my Gmail account, as I mentioned above.
Linda knew and I knew that there was something unfair here, it was inescapable, but she absolutely refused to acknowledge that as a possibility. It was pretty bizarre, Linda seemed scared of admitting that there was even such a possibility of unfairness, so much so that she reiterated more than once that she thought the BT policy was fair.
As with all things, the truth doesn’t lie and Linda, cornered and seeming scared, had no rational, reasonable response. She had no options and reached into herself to pull out, and drop on me another Babylonian Buck Pass. Linda told me her manager would call me back at some point that day.
Soon after, Mark rang up. He seemed very nice. The first thing I asked was, “is this call recorded?”
“No it’s not recorded,” said Mark.
“Can you record it, please?” I asked. I felt that I was prepared to fight this unfairness and this call recording might be evidence either way.
“No, that’s not possible.” Correct, Mark told me it was not possible to record the call. How can this be? BT who often tells us that they record our calls to them could not, in fact, record this call? Mulder? Skully? Hello?
“It’s because it is an outgoing call,” Mark said.. .
As if I was to go, “Oh yeah, doh! ‘Silly me,’” in my finest Harry Hill or Homer S headvoice. I didn’t. I asked, “Ok, can I call you so we you record the call?”
Mark said that that wouldn’t be possible either. This is an aside from the main thrust of this recounting, but I consider the claim that BT cannot record a phone call between one of their staff and one of their customers to be logically very close to a full on lie. I digress...
With the Call unrecorded I admit I felt my position had weakened. Even if I got him to bask in the righteousness of his righting a wrong because it was the right thing to do, if it wasn’t recorded he could always deny his work-based epiphany. I jest, but you get the point...
I re-explained the situation to Mark. At first his line of defence was the idea that this would not have been my first such charge. He went back through my account and quarter by quarter was forced to agree that, indeed, there had been no such charge. We agreed today’s bill was the first charge of its kind and thus very out of the blue.
Mark was totally in agreement here, all the way through. I was thinking, Mark seems a reasonable man, he is going to do the right thing! It was looking positive, and then Mark said that he needed to go and further check on my account, and thus would need to call me back in ten minutes. We had already done the pertinent account checking as I understood it, and clearly the pertinent fact was as we agreed. But away he went and when he came back ten minutes later... he had the solution.
It seemed a bit inconsistent with why he said he was going, but nonetheless I listened to his offer. They would refund me £60 of the £310 pound charges, but only if I changed my account to their most expensive one, and thus renewed my contract with them.
Think about that in terms of the exchanges involved between the parties, isn’t it kind of weird as a solution to unfairness goes?
The offer was insulting and absurd, it was a fractional token glued to more commitment to BT Broadband. Once it was clear that his offer wouldn’t be accepted, Mark added the next layer of his tactic. He started apologising and insisting that was all he could do. It was smart: the offer could be accepted as it stood, or if refused, it could be used as part of a Fob-off apology tactic. So, rather than just saying, “Sorry, but bend over,” Mark was offering the far nicer, “Sorry, but bend over, but it is OK, I will use a little lube.”
This is how hegemonies dominate. It is their oxygen, the idea of getting the dominated to agree to consent to further exploitation because it has greater apparent benefit than zero benefit. Mark didn’t know he was doing this, it is a product of system conditioning.
Once it was clear I wasn’t yet prepared to bite the pillow Mark became more resolute. He started insisting they had sent the emails to my Gmail, even though earlier he wasn’t sure of this, and even earlier Linda said that they could only send it to one account. I kept insisting back that as it wasn’t in spam or anywhere in my Gmail and as I never delete emails, clearly it hadn’t been sent.
This fact was hugely emphasized to Mark when I started reading through the spam emails from BT I had in Gmail. But nothing could change him from his committed path of apologising as he enforced the unfairness.
I asked him if he could actually make the decision to “refund.” He said he could but he wouldn’t.
Again, as with Linda, it was peculiar. I was clearly in the right, he knew this, I knew this. It was doublespeak. He couldn’t give a reason other than the clearly false reason that the emails were sent.
In the end, with me not backing down, he knew what to do. Escalate. The third Babylonain Buck Pass of the day, the next carrot on a stick that lead deeper up into BT’s slack and uncaring bowels... you guessed it... Mark told me, “I will have to have my manager call you.”
At this point I was literally chuckling. It was like a Monty Python sketch.
“My manager will call by the end of Monday.”
I gave him some “annoyed Buddhist “ goodbye and that was that. I await Monday’s call, pretty convinced that BT Broadband’s response will be to propagate the unfairness further.
As I see it, BT has unknowingly committed a theft against me: they took something without my consent to which they are not entitled. They are not entitled to it because they simply, and demonstrably, had not contacted me to warn me.
Linda isn’t a thief. Nor is Mark. Nor, I would imagine, is anyone connected with this issue in BT, but this is how Babylon works. It is an Emergent Badness. The system produced an unfair output, with imperfect systems like all systems are, that is bound to happen. This is to be expected, especially in a corporation as vast and connected as BT.
But the problem is that in order to correct that fairness, as all systems should, specific human decisions need to be made by specific humans and these, by definition, are going against the system. There is a bug in the way institutions work, especially greedy ones.
I am sure Mark and Linda could see this unfairness, but they were too pressurised not to correct it. Correcting it would require “rocking the boat” and this has a risk associated with it that Mark and Linda would need to knowingly or subconsciously consider. For example:
These conditions, and conditions like them, are how the Babylonian Hegemony dominates its sub systems and its people. However it’s wrapped up, its boils down to fear.
I doubt I will get a refund. At some point the value of my efforts in fighting this unfairness will become too great for the value of the refund. This is another tactic that Babylon has emerged to prevent the individual from having their rights granted and protected; make it effortful and time consuming to have the wrongs corrected. We see this everywhere in the dominating complexes above us, but I believe it is especially true of the big corporations.
Maybe I could forget the value of the fight and turn it into a moral crusade, but frankly, it’s not that important an issue when we consider the other far graver issues we and others are being forced to gag on. And even if I did get all “Bono” on it and, after twelve years and a UN Tribunal, won my £310 back there is no victory really, save one the ego can enjoy. I would get a refund, but the system with its inherent, intractable structure of fear wouldn’t change.
The only solution to the problem of Babylonic Domination is to opt out. To stand back as much as possible from the corporatocracy, which is quite hard when you like gadgets and fast broadband.
Oh these modern dilemmas!
have fun!
This morning I got a quarterly ISP/Phone bill for £400. Of that, £310 was for “Broadband Usage” as deemed by BT Broadband’s fair use policy. This is an immense and totally unexpected bill for three months’ landline internet usage.
I was sure I was unlimited, apparently not. I made a mistake in that. But that is not my issue.
The issue is that BT Broadband hadn’t tried to contact me at my phone, home or Gmail even though the latter two were regularly spammed with all kinds of offers from them. Surely they should have “warned me” that, after ten years, for the first time, they were going to slap a £300+ charge on me completely out of the blue?
I was shocked and shaking at this corporate audacity.
I rang BT Broadband up and spoke to someone in India who gave me the first line of fob-off; she told me that it was their “fair use” policy and there was nothing, really, I could do. She assured me me she thought it was fair. I mentioned Ofcom and she told me right away that Ofcom was aware of their “fair use” policy – ie don’t bother contacting them. For every protestation and question she had an answer until, in the end, she performed a typical “Babylonian Buck Pass” by giving me another number to call.
I called and spoke to Linda in England.
Linda was in the Fair Use department and seemed almost caring. She told me that she was sorry I was so shocked and upset by the charges but she did insist that they were fair. I explained that I had absolutely no warning about the imminent charges which would have prompted an immediate change of account by me. She insisted that BT sent emails to my BT email address and thus it was fair that I was charged.
In made it very clear to her that I didn’t check that account, nor had I, nor should I.
We agreed that:
1) I demonstrably hadn’t checked that email address for years, if at all.
2) They had my Gmail account.
But then Linda seemed to make up from nowhere the idea that they could only send warnings to my BT account and not my Gmail account. This fact was not compatible with the fact that BT Broadband regularly send me promotional and other emails to my Gmail account, as I mentioned above.
Linda knew and I knew that there was something unfair here, it was inescapable, but she absolutely refused to acknowledge that as a possibility. It was pretty bizarre, Linda seemed scared of admitting that there was even such a possibility of unfairness, so much so that she reiterated more than once that she thought the BT policy was fair.
As with all things, the truth doesn’t lie and Linda, cornered and seeming scared, had no rational, reasonable response. She had no options and reached into herself to pull out, and drop on me another Babylonian Buck Pass. Linda told me her manager would call me back at some point that day.
Soon after, Mark rang up. He seemed very nice. The first thing I asked was, “is this call recorded?”
“No it’s not recorded,” said Mark.
“Can you record it, please?” I asked. I felt that I was prepared to fight this unfairness and this call recording might be evidence either way.
“No, that’s not possible.” Correct, Mark told me it was not possible to record the call. How can this be? BT who often tells us that they record our calls to them could not, in fact, record this call? Mulder? Skully? Hello?
“It’s because it is an outgoing call,” Mark said.. .
As if I was to go, “Oh yeah, doh! ‘Silly me,’” in my finest Harry Hill or Homer S headvoice. I didn’t. I asked, “Ok, can I call you so we you record the call?”
Mark said that that wouldn’t be possible either. This is an aside from the main thrust of this recounting, but I consider the claim that BT cannot record a phone call between one of their staff and one of their customers to be logically very close to a full on lie. I digress...
With the Call unrecorded I admit I felt my position had weakened. Even if I got him to bask in the righteousness of his righting a wrong because it was the right thing to do, if it wasn’t recorded he could always deny his work-based epiphany. I jest, but you get the point...
I re-explained the situation to Mark. At first his line of defence was the idea that this would not have been my first such charge. He went back through my account and quarter by quarter was forced to agree that, indeed, there had been no such charge. We agreed today’s bill was the first charge of its kind and thus very out of the blue.
Mark was totally in agreement here, all the way through. I was thinking, Mark seems a reasonable man, he is going to do the right thing! It was looking positive, and then Mark said that he needed to go and further check on my account, and thus would need to call me back in ten minutes. We had already done the pertinent account checking as I understood it, and clearly the pertinent fact was as we agreed. But away he went and when he came back ten minutes later... he had the solution.
It seemed a bit inconsistent with why he said he was going, but nonetheless I listened to his offer. They would refund me £60 of the £310 pound charges, but only if I changed my account to their most expensive one, and thus renewed my contract with them.
Think about that in terms of the exchanges involved between the parties, isn’t it kind of weird as a solution to unfairness goes?
The offer was insulting and absurd, it was a fractional token glued to more commitment to BT Broadband. Once it was clear that his offer wouldn’t be accepted, Mark added the next layer of his tactic. He started apologising and insisting that was all he could do. It was smart: the offer could be accepted as it stood, or if refused, it could be used as part of a Fob-off apology tactic. So, rather than just saying, “Sorry, but bend over,” Mark was offering the far nicer, “Sorry, but bend over, but it is OK, I will use a little lube.”
This is how hegemonies dominate. It is their oxygen, the idea of getting the dominated to agree to consent to further exploitation because it has greater apparent benefit than zero benefit. Mark didn’t know he was doing this, it is a product of system conditioning.
Once it was clear I wasn’t yet prepared to bite the pillow Mark became more resolute. He started insisting they had sent the emails to my Gmail, even though earlier he wasn’t sure of this, and even earlier Linda said that they could only send it to one account. I kept insisting back that as it wasn’t in spam or anywhere in my Gmail and as I never delete emails, clearly it hadn’t been sent.
This fact was hugely emphasized to Mark when I started reading through the spam emails from BT I had in Gmail. But nothing could change him from his committed path of apologising as he enforced the unfairness.
I asked him if he could actually make the decision to “refund.” He said he could but he wouldn’t.
Again, as with Linda, it was peculiar. I was clearly in the right, he knew this, I knew this. It was doublespeak. He couldn’t give a reason other than the clearly false reason that the emails were sent.
In the end, with me not backing down, he knew what to do. Escalate. The third Babylonain Buck Pass of the day, the next carrot on a stick that lead deeper up into BT’s slack and uncaring bowels... you guessed it... Mark told me, “I will have to have my manager call you.”
At this point I was literally chuckling. It was like a Monty Python sketch.
“My manager will call by the end of Monday.”
I gave him some “annoyed Buddhist “ goodbye and that was that. I await Monday’s call, pretty convinced that BT Broadband’s response will be to propagate the unfairness further.
As I see it, BT has unknowingly committed a theft against me: they took something without my consent to which they are not entitled. They are not entitled to it because they simply, and demonstrably, had not contacted me to warn me.
Linda isn’t a thief. Nor is Mark. Nor, I would imagine, is anyone connected with this issue in BT, but this is how Babylon works. It is an Emergent Badness. The system produced an unfair output, with imperfect systems like all systems are, that is bound to happen. This is to be expected, especially in a corporation as vast and connected as BT.
But the problem is that in order to correct that fairness, as all systems should, specific human decisions need to be made by specific humans and these, by definition, are going against the system. There is a bug in the way institutions work, especially greedy ones.
I am sure Mark and Linda could see this unfairness, but they were too pressurised not to correct it. Correcting it would require “rocking the boat” and this has a risk associated with it that Mark and Linda would need to knowingly or subconsciously consider. For example:
- Highlighting the work-system’s imperfection.
- Subjecting the company to financial loss.
- Stepping outside the homogenised work culture.
- Risking criticism for making the wrong decision.
- Effecting future personal promotion plans
- Effecting Bonus expectations.
These conditions, and conditions like them, are how the Babylonian Hegemony dominates its sub systems and its people. However it’s wrapped up, its boils down to fear.
I doubt I will get a refund. At some point the value of my efforts in fighting this unfairness will become too great for the value of the refund. This is another tactic that Babylon has emerged to prevent the individual from having their rights granted and protected; make it effortful and time consuming to have the wrongs corrected. We see this everywhere in the dominating complexes above us, but I believe it is especially true of the big corporations.
Maybe I could forget the value of the fight and turn it into a moral crusade, but frankly, it’s not that important an issue when we consider the other far graver issues we and others are being forced to gag on. And even if I did get all “Bono” on it and, after twelve years and a UN Tribunal, won my £310 back there is no victory really, save one the ego can enjoy. I would get a refund, but the system with its inherent, intractable structure of fear wouldn’t change.
The only solution to the problem of Babylonic Domination is to opt out. To stand back as much as possible from the corporatocracy, which is quite hard when you like gadgets and fast broadband.
Oh these modern dilemmas!
have fun!
0
Comments
-
If your other internet activity is as long-winded as your post, then I can quite understand why you may have breached the FUP policy.
But nowhere do you actually say which package you are on, how many GB over your allowance they have billed you for, (presumably 310GB, since they charge £1 per GB) or whether you have actually used all this data?
If you haven't, I would suggest that someone else is, and that the first thing you should do is to get your wireless connection secured if it is not.
Presumably you are on Option 2, which has a 20GB cap. The only unlimited package is Option 3, which of course still has an FUP policy, as do all unlimited packages.No free lunch, and no free laptop
0 -
I've got to admit that I gave up reading the orignial post at around the half way point. Not because of the sheer longevity of it, but because I was incredibly bored and distanced from the facts the OP (I'm presuming) was trying to convey.
If anyone cares to sum up the above post then please do.0 -
If anyone cares to sum up the above post then please do
He busted his download limit big time.
He owes BT a lot of money.
He argued the toss, at length, with BT.
He still owes BT a lot of money.0 -
If anyone cares to sum up the above post then please do.
a) why didn't BT contact me to warn me?
b) they claim they did try to contact me, but I refuse to read the email account they contact me on
c) I'm a budding author, and this is the first draft of the first chapter of my new book0
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