Patterns

Still haven’t received any update from the Telekom service desk regarding my latest inquiry. I also called in again today in order to see if there might be someone that could actually help (of course not, not even telling them that I would pay to figure out why VDSL is supposedly not available helped).

Therefore I decided to end this journey and quit the existing contract for the land line. As this has to be done via snail mail I decided to add a few notes about the whole story just for the fun of it (not that I expect anyone to read and actually react to it).

I was stunned to receive an e-mail with my first invoice from Deutsche Telekom today. So at least that seems to be working. Still I am not able to properly use their self-service website and I also assume that this is the reason why I am also not able to order VDSL.

I will be a little more patient and wait for the service desk to answer my request and then terminate the service (provided that their answer will be another “please try again”).

As I am getting bored of waiting for my first invoice from Deutsche Telekom (will it ever come?) I thought it might be fun to get into the discussion with the service desk again:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ihre Antwort ging nicht über den
Text der Fehlermeldung auf der Webseite hinaus ("Versuchen sie es
später nocheinmal") und stellt somit keinerlei Hilfe dar. Des Spasses
halber habe ich ihre Empfehlung befolgt und es in Abständen von jeweils
24h "nochmal versucht" mit dem wie erwartet gleichen Ergebnis.

Ich bitte sie hiermit abermals, mein eigentliches Anliegen an die entsprechende
Abteilung weiterzuleiten:

Bitte korrigieren sie in ihrem Datenbestand die Zuordnung meiner aktiven(!)
Buchungskontonummer 01234567890 zu meiner aktuellen Telefonnummer 0203-01234567890.

>Kundennummer: 01234567890
>Buchungskontonummer: 01234567890
>Alte Buchungskontonummer: 01234567890 (nicht mehr aktiv!)
>Telefon-Nummer: 0203-01234567890

Vielen Dank.

In short I am asking them (again) to fix the customer data association in their databases and added some irony to the mix. To make it a little harder for them to actually spot it I left out the irony tags…

Now let’s see how long it will take them to respond with the same useless “please try again later” default answer.

Ah, it’s just so great to live in a service desert like Germany.

At the end of last week I received the following response to my support request asking to fix the link betweeen my phone and account number. Apparently the agent working on that task did not understand what I asked them to do (in German only, sorry):

Entschuldigen Sie, dass Sie die Anwendung -Mein T-Home-
für Ihren Anschluss 0203 - xxxxxxx momentan nicht
vollständig nutzen können.

Dieser Fehler tritt zeitweise auf. Bitte versuchen
Sie es zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt noch einmal.

Herr Huptas, wir bedanken uns für Ihr Verständnis.

Für weitere Fragen schreiben Sie uns gern erneut. Sie
erreichen uns jederzeit.

In short this means “try again later” which is what the website already said. Dear friends from Deutsche Telekom: Are you telling me that even when pinpointing where the issue is you are unable to fix it? Why all the hassle with providing support at all?

I am absolutely dissapointed and it reminds me of the experiences I had with Arcor in the past. To me it seems most German telco/ISP companies are unable to provide the service they proclaim in their ads and even worse unable to provide at least capable support staff (of course I knew this all along before I started the VDSL adventure, but being proven right sometimes has a bitter taste to it).

The following small script has been copied over from madboa.com:

#!/bin/sh
#
# usage: retrieve-cert.sh remote.host.name [port]
#
REMHOST=$1
REMPORT=${2:-443}

echo |\
openssl s_client -connect ${REMHOST}:${REMPORT} 2>&1 |\
sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’