It's one of life's irritations

Like the fact that Notepad on my Windows 95 machine insists on forgetting that I want to use wordwrap, Telewest is a regular source of irritation. Ironically, I will be relying on the aforementioned organisation to relay this article to you all.

Telewest are an organisation where you can say "nice website, shame about the product". They have a number of pleasant people working in customer services, yet apologising for problems, even offering to have them fixed, is no substitute for having a good product in the first place. This is my major gripe with Telewest - they offer revolutionary services and fail to deliver.

My phone line (1980's technology) is generally reliable - though it did take them a few attempts to install it and it did go down rather dramatically recently. However, the digital cable television service has not been impressive at all. Apart from irritating problems like picture freezing and the failure to receive any channels, the big catch with Telewest is that they don't seem to know enough about the technology to provide a reliable service.

Today's problem came in the shape of their Interactive TV service. I thought that I'd try playing some of their online games. These are games, which, apparently, come from the internet. They require the user to login and this, in turn, requires the use of the virtual keyboard, a facility which took a number of attempts to find. It seems that, once you've slaved away at picking the characters, one by one, using the cursor keys on the remote control (no, I'm not going to buy a keyboard for £30), your game is up. Yes, the online games do not actually work. They have 6 channels of games and each one is either not online yet or brings up an error when you try to use it. Pointless.

I would contact them to complain, but their customer support service is only open 8am to 8pm. I work from 9am to 6pm, leaving me 3 hours when I might be able to contact them - during which I'm usually busy. I could contact them via their website, but that's a recipe for disaster. They ignore the contact forms as a rule. However, if you do get a response by email (which I did once) and reply to it, you get a message telling you politely to sod off. You cannot reply to their emails - you must only use the form to send them any questions or comments. Not only that, but if you want to tell them that you are an existing customer, you must have your account number to hand or you cannot declare this fact. Plus, and this is a killer, their "comments" box only has room for 1048 characters - the most beautiful arbitrary limit I've ever seen! (especially when I have so much to tell them)

So, I'll suffer in silence, hankering after broadband technology and getting broadbean technology (it's green and kids turn their noses up at it). Or maybe I'll reach breaking point and do something. Watch this space.

9 January 2001
Ashley Frieze