The Road to Hell Goes via British Telecom

I’ve given it a month. By now I’d expected my rage at the memory of a Christmas spent alone, ill and without broadband to subside. It has not. One whole month to fix a fault that was diagnosed on day one and could have been put right within 24 hours – if human common sense was still in charge. But at British Telecom, common sense has left the building. Replaced by systems that don’t recognise problems that are out of the ordinary and do not give employees the discretion to fix them. Everything is process. Everything is script. When they encounter anything not in that script, front-line call handlers simply palm you off with excuses because they don’t know what else to do.

I tell this story because I believe there is a lesson in it. We are being frightened right now into thinking that AI and the computer systems it uses can take over most things humans do and execute them better. AI will be the master, we humans no more than its dull and powerless servants. People like the call handlers at British Telecom seem already conditioned to see themselves that way. But AI is just a bunch of algorithms that synthesise and organise at lightning speed information that already exists. When those systems are presented with the novel, the unexpected, they hit the buffers.

Rather than teaching people they are stupider than AI and therefore must be passive components of the machine, surely we should be empowering them to take responsibility, make decisions and solve problems using qualities essential to being human that machines will never possess. I honestly believe the world will dissolve into chaos unless we do.

My nightmare began on December 13th last year. I noticed a message on my mobile. “Wi-Fi not available”. I checked my other devices. None had broadband. I rushed into my study to find the router, normally lit a serene blue, was flashing pink, pink, pink, orange. I rang BT.

This was to be the first of dozens of calls. You go through the same series of options and button pushing of course. You get the same pointless instruction about testing your router. I can see it isn’t working FFS! Then of course they try to palm you off to their website for some DIY solution. When you insist on speaking to a human being, you are tortured with a further 15 minutes or so of muzak fed through a blender. In my case, Christmas songs. If I ever have to hear the mangled tones of Mariah Carey or worse still, the Pogues, I will rip my own ears off.

Finally you get through to someone. The young people I spoke to were all perfectly pleasant and keen to be helpful. The catch was when they couldn’t solve the problem, they had no idea what to do next. At which point they would get off the line as quickly as possible by promising someone would call me back.

I later learned that they have a limit on how much time they are supposed to spend on each caller. I’m guessing there are financial or disciplinary consequences for taking too long over any one problem. And above all they hate it when you ask to speak to their supervisor. “My supervisor will only tell you what I’m telling you,” I was told more than once. I’m guessing that handing a problem up the chain of command also has negative consequences.

It wasn’t that they didn’t know what was wrong. On my second call I spoke to “Dave” in Stockport. He could tell me exactly where in my flat my modem was. On his instruction, I took photos of all the key equipment, which I sent him. He checked which lights were not working and said – correctly as it turned out – that either the modem or its battery backup, or possibly both, appeared to have failed. I needed an engineer visit and either repair or replace.

Some background is necessary here. My block of flats was the first high-rise in the country to get fibre-optic cabling, all the way back in 2012. I’m proud to say I played a part in that. It’s hard to remember now but back then people living in new blocks of flats, especially on the highest floors, found it virtually impossible to get a decent broadband signal. The strength of that signal depended on how far you were from those dark green street cabinets that serve as critical nodes between the local network exchange and individual homes. In those days that signal had to travel along a pair of copper wires from the cabinet to your building, then up through various floors via whatever cabling your particular tower block had in place. By the time it got to your flat, the signal was so weakened that Eurovision, which I tried to watch via my laptop as an experiment, was reduced to a series of shifting smears of colour.

An engineer friend at another local high-rise knew all about a new technology called fibre-optic. He also knew someone who knew someone very senior in BT. We got together and lobbied this BT executive to get our local East London exchange upgraded and both our blocks fitted with fibre. At that point in Tower Hamlets, residential high-rises were being thrown up on all sides. We pitched our two estates as an experiment. If our 500+ residents bought into fibre-optic at the rate we predicted, BT would have a huge new market cabling the dozens of other tower blocks under construction. They could approach developers and offer their services for free, signing up thousands of new customers in exchange.

I remember Michael and me sitting opposite a handful of Openreach execs round my dining table, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. They needed to know what sort of upgrade the local Poplar exchange would require. “How many of your residents do you think will go for fibre-optic,” they enquired? “30%? 40?”

“100%!” Michael and I spoke with one voice. The Openreach team looked dubious. We were astonished. Did BT not understand what they had to offer here? (They didn’t, as it turned out, and because of this a private firm, Hyperoptic, was able to get its foot in the door with developers, cabling new estates and hoovering up customers BT might have had.)

But for us at least the project went ahead. In the summer of 2012 the Poplar phone exchange was converted and 158 flats in our building and 350 in Michael’s estate were duly connected. I got an Openreach modem the size of an iPad, with another mobile-phone-sized box containing a battery backup. For 13 years these devices transformed my access to the internet. Until they failed.

Back to my nightmare. Having correctly diagnosed the problem as a failed modem, all “Dave” at BT had to do was book an Openreach engineer to replace the long-outdated equipment. Logically I should have been back up and running within days.

But here we hit two snags. First, although Openreach remains a wholly owned subsidiary of British Telecom, since 2018 its management functions have been spun off into an independent company. No longer can BT book Openreach’s engineers directly. The whole problem has to be handed off to Openreach to make appointments through their own systems. All BT could do was say they would call me again when a booking had been made. And then there was Problem Number 2 – BT’s address system did not tally with Openreach’s.

BT knew where I lived. They supplied a service to that address and duly billed me for it. But on Openreach’s now separate system, my home address, for some bizarre reason, simply did not exist. Which meant BT’s computers just returned error messages when they tried to confirm the appointment.

Not that anybody explained this to me at first. One BT rep after another simply told me they were pursuing Openreach but no appointment ever came. Meanwhile I had nothing but the data available via my mobile phone. Which is when I discovered that my network provider has virtually no signal at my address. If your phone automatically switches to broadband the moment you open your front door, this isn’t something you ever become aware of till your internet fails.

So there I was – alone, trapped at home by a vicious flu, nearly two weeks into this nightmare, Christmas days away, my birthday looming and completely cut off from the world. I admit it. I’m an addict. I can’t even fall asleep without some podcast or other playing beside my bed. Things got bleak. I became aware at some point that Chris Rea, once an idol of mine, had died. I wanted to listen to “Road to Hell”. But I couldn’t. I was on that very road, I reflected grimly, and it went via British Telecom.

I’m ashamed to say I melted down on another of those endless phone calls. I didn’t just cry. I howled in anguish. I demanded to speak to supervisors. I made empty, desperate threats that heads would roll. At this point BT booked one of their own engineers to visit. They probably knew this would be a pointless exercise. But anything to shut me up, I imagine.

A young man named Brian duly turned up – on time, pleasant, clearly knew his stuff and our building, keen to help – except that, like everyone else at BT, he was powerless. “If I could just trace the signal,” he said plaintively. “Then I’d know for sure where it has failed. But I’d need a light pen and BT engineers don’t carry those. You need to book Openreach.”

“Then give me a number or a contact at Openreach so I can call them myself,” I pleaded.

“No can do. Openreach aren’t customer facing. It all has to go through BT, I’m afraid.”

By this time my sobbing and the number of my calls had obviously raised a red flag somewhere within BT. On Christmas Eve I was phoned by someone called Aaminah, with a strong Geordie accent and a no-nonsense manner. This young woman finally ordered a mini-hub for me, to restore my home internet while the problem was fixed. Why did no one else in those long weeks tell me this was an option?

But more importantly she finally abandoned an obviously broken system and its useless script. She did what human beings are supposed to do and used the qualities that will always make us superior – creativity, empathy, common sense. She phoned every friend and contact she knew within Openreach. She did research. Turns out mine is not the first address that has disappeared from the system. She came up with a bespoke solution. It involved deleting my account from BT’s systems altogether and starting all over again as a new customer. And given the holidays it took a further two weeks to get an engineer out. But virtually every day of that hiatus she would call me to check I was OK.

When the man from Openreach finally showed up he was all of 10 minutes at my flat. Unscrewed the old modem, replaced it with a tiny new one and just like that I was back online.

If anyone from BT reads this, surely it is insane that this problem took 31 days to fix, resulted in such distress to a long-standing customer and cost you nearly £400 in compensation. Put the humans back in charge. Train your call handlers to use their initiative. To take responsibility. To know when the computer must be overridden. Reward rather than punish them for good customer service and for referring difficult problems up the food chain. And put Aaminah Patel in charge of all this. In fact let her run the whole damn company!