Bwahh!

Things finally seem to be getting back to a somewhat more even keel.  I received word (well, letter) that my visa app has been passed onto a case worker to be dealt with, but not to contact UKBA until they contact me (the implication being that the letter wasn't contact, which I could be a smartass and argue).  And don't make any urgent travel plans.  That second one is a half-oops: I made travel plans even before the visa application was sent off, because, well, I have travel plans.  Friends marrying and Thanksgiving.  I don't consider them urgent because my travels are in mid-September and after, but given that they "try to decide on 95% of applications within 6 months" I'm not quite sure what UKBA's definition of urgent is.  If I don't hear something by the end of June, I probably will contact them, regardless of what the letter says.

Perhaps more importantly, our internet connection has finally been restored.  One of my tasks soon is to write a formal letter of complaint to Ofcom and Virgin Media about this whole fiasco.  I shall try to sum it up for you as concisely as possible.*

We had been having problems off-and-on with Virgin Media, who provided our phoneline and broadband (DSL, which comes down the phoneline, because where we live fibre optic/cable isn't available), for a long time.  When we moved just over a year ago, they opened a new account for us, which not only changed our plan (no longer unlimited downloads, but that didn't actually affect us) but also caused us to be billed for both accounts for about three months.  I was explicitly told, because I explicitly asked, that neither of these things would happen.  But they did.  After noticing the billing issue, I then proceeded to spend 59 days trying to get our money back whilst various people at Virgin told me different things.  I don't think most, if any, of them intended to lie to me, but they did, telling me everything from "the money will be reimbursed to your bank account by Monday" to the old "the check is in the mail."  At 60 days I would have contacted Ofcom, who handles disputes like this with ISPs and similar.  60 days after you've first notified your ISP is when Ofcom will start to step in.

Then, we had other billing problems in the form of our price being increased, but our services not receiving a proportional bump in quality.  I talked them down a bit, but about a month ago--six months after the previous rise--they upped our bill by £5 a month, with another £2-3 rise coming two months later.  So I contacted them to get our MAC (Migration Account Code) so we could take our business elsewhere--you can't really change ISPs without one, and they have to give you one within something like 5 days of your request.  I was told that I couldn't get it because I wasn't the account holder.  Never mind that I could add services to our account, increasing the amount of money they could charge, but I couldn't request a MAC or remove services because of--and no, I'm not kidding--"Data Protection."  The guy couldn't explain it satisfactorily to me, so my comment was basically "as long as you get more money, it's protected, but it's not protected if you get less."  His response was a long-winded double-speak yes.

That pissed me off royally, since I'm the one who set up the new account when we moved and knows all about it (I know the password, Adam doesn't), but because my name isn't on the account--just the debit card that pays the bills--I couldn't request a MAC.  AND they didn't even try to talk me into staying with a discount.  So Adam called the next day and got the MAC.  They sorta tried to talk him into staying, but when he told them the price we'd be getting from a competitor--and not an introductory price, but the regular price--they said "well, read the fine print."  Funny, I already had.  Orange, the company we've now switched to, is about £7 a month cheaper than our old price on Virgin, or nearly £15 less than what it would have been post all price increases.  AND we get more included from Orange (free 0845 calls, which are not free on Virgin, but all businesses use them).

But that isn't what has pissed me off the most, because while all of that is irritating, it's didn't directly affect our/my day-to-day life.  Having our phone line cancelled did.

It turns out that Virgin doesn't offer a phoneline only service.  If we had cable (can't, not offered in this area) we could have kept our phoneline, but because we only had/have broadband and phone, when Orange took over our broadband and Virgin received confirmation, Virgin shut off our phoneline.  And the broadband comes down our phoneline, so no line = no broadband.  Or narrowband, shortband, longband, marching band, or any other type of band you can think of.  And to answer your question of "why aren't the broadband and phoneline taken over simultaneously" I can only say that no one knows (I asked) but that's just how it's done over here.

Initially, I thought we got shut off due to non-payment of our bill.  Because of the aforementioned fiasco with double billing--when we were still doing business with them--I didn't want to have to try and get my money back from Virgin when we were no longer customers.  So I cancelled the direct debit order (now that's data protection, bitches!), and told them to send me a bill and we would pay it promptly.  I told them this three times: once in an email so it was in writing (not responded to), once over the phone (where the guy was nice but not particularly helpful and we never got a bill), and once in reply to the automatic email that told me our services would be "restricted" if we didn't pay the bill--but to disregard the email if we've already spoken to them about it.  No reply to that email either.  So exactly 5 days after they sent out that second email our phoneline went dead.  Fabulous.

Luckily, Orange called me the following afternoon about something else; specifically, they had me listed as Mrs, not Ms, and I asked them to change it (via email about 4 hours before our line went dead).  That was an assumption on their part, because I'm pretty sure I never had to check a box stating my title, and if I did, it certainly wouldn't have been Mrs.  But they called to let me know they'd fixed it for me (because all name changes on the account are impossible to do without sending them paperwork, but I didn't have that paperwork, since it doesn't exist!), so I told them what happened.  Eventually, I was transferred to the tech people--not tech support, but actual technicians--who said they were really sorry about that all and they'd try to take over our phone line by Tuesday at the latest, probably Monday (this was Friday).  When I got home Friday afternoon, we had a working phone line.  But it takes 7-10 working days (Monday-Friday) to get broadband on a line, so since we had a "new line"*** it was going to take 7-10 from the new number going live.

In short, it did.  About 10 working days after the new line came up we had broadband back.  It was confusing, though, because there was a left hand/right hand thing going on; the techs were doing their thing exactly as stated, but apparently hadn't informed customer service of this, because customer service told us it would be a week later than it actually came up.  This is all fine and good, really, but still slightly amusing.  So far, at least, the people at Orange have been very nice, honestly helpful--or at least honest in that they don't know something, whereas Virgin would make something up--and the service has been solid and reasonably fast (we don't get actually fast here).  Plus they even offered us a partial refund (which I will call to deal with shortly) for our troubles, even though this wasn't really their fault.

So long story short, that's what's been going on with us the last few weeks.  Oh, and a paper for Girl Museum, which isn't going well but is sucking up a bunch of time.  Still waiting on word about Titanium Solstice, though the editor has chosen submissions, just hasn't notified authors (or at least not me) yet.

*Given that conciseness is something that I only seem to have when I need to hit a word count on an academic paper, don't count on it.

**Now where have I heard that before...

***Note that there are no physical changes to the line, only the number.  No, I still don't understand it either.  I've given up on that though, and accepted words like bureaucracy and red-tape and idiots.  And assholes, when applied to Virgin.