The Web of Evil

“I’ve been on TalkTalk for three months,” said my mother. “Now suddenly my machine’s asking me for a password if I want to access my emails. Why is that?”

“Well,” said the young man in the Carphone Warehouse, “they haven’t yet configured the system to work with Outlook Express. So until they do, you should set up another email account, maybe on Hotmail.”

“But up until yesterday I was using Outlook Express for my emails all the time,” said my mother.

“Um,” said the man.

“And when I got broadband it was really fast,” my mother continued. “Now, three months later, it’s as pitifully slow as my old 56k modem. Why?”

“Ah,” said the young man, brightening up, “where do you live?” She told him. He nodded. “Yes, that’ll be because so many people in your area have taken up TalkTalk’s fantastic free broadband offer. That many people using the service at once means it gets quite clogged up. Plus,” he went on as my mother was about to object, “there’s the westward turn of the Earth.”

“What?” said my mother, wrongfooted.

“You see, just as we’re all logging off for the day,” the young man said authoritatively, “people in the United States are logging on, and then Japan. Suddenly there are a lot more people online, and so in the afternoons our service in this country slows right down.”

“I see,” my mother said slowly. “So we’d better hope China doesn’t go completely online any time soon.”

“Yes,” agreed the young man, sagely.

Not the first time my mother has had cause to rue the day she switched to TalkTalk. The first phone bill she got showed about ten rogue calls, to and from numbers that were nothing to do with her. “Yeah,” was the response (after the traditional scalp-clawing half-hour on hold), “that happens sometimes. What we’ll do for security is put a password on your line. You’ll have to give it every time you want to make a call.”

That is, obviously, an astonishingly bad solution to the problem. My mother’s only consolation was that the person she spoke to completely forgot to implement it. Perhaps a flicker of interest in running decent security at their end would indicate that TalkTalk truly intended to provide the service they describe so effusively in their brochures, but currently they’re all hat and no cattle.

A few months ago my cousin, who came here five years ago from Johannesburg, hung on for an hour and a half until finally he got through to a TalkTalk engineer, who happened to be South African. She couldn’t help so she put him through to her superior, whose Afrikaans accent was so thick even my cousin had trouble decoding it. “Where are you?” he asked. Turns out TalkTalk’s technical helpline is based in... Johannesburg. The fact that they then couldn’t help scarcely mattered after that.

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Also to be filed under “Are they trying to baffle me with bullshit or are they really that dumb?”: the BT engineer who came last year to fix my incredibly crackly phone line. He went off to the local exchange and returned triumphant. “That’s sorted it,” he beamed, plugging in his testing equipment. The moment he switched it on, it was clear my line was just as viciously noisy as ever. “No,” he said, seeing my face, “it just, er, it takes a while to warm up.” I got them to send another engineer who didn’t appear to believe valves were involved.