19 December (Part 2) - Computer says No
I eventually got to the bottom of why
BT had refused to transfer a 50 year
customer's telephone number from one side of Yarnton Way to the other - it wasn’t easy.
The Twitter Team I alerted to the problem were OK as far as they
could go and confirmed that moving the number should be possible. They referred me to the Home Moves Team
where the automated phone call
response assured me that BT had a commitment to excellence but the lady who answered was
far removed from that. If the computer said No the answer was No and no I
could not speak to a higher authority. That is not allowed.
I am really happy that my only connection to BT now is the pension and Christmas
cards to the four old workmates who are not yet dead.
I took a trip to Wolvercote Road to discuss the preferred way forward with the old lady and found
the door entry system broken. The door cannot be opened remotely from any flat
and if my 90+ year old friend is ill in bed and the doctor calls she has to
descend eight floors to let him in; and Peabody has left it like that for at least
four months. If the blocks are coming down they won’t want to spend the money and why should they care?
Once inside we decided to call the Home Moves Team again and struck lucky. The
lady was just as perplexed by the situation as I was. It was a long call with
several breaks for off-line enquiries.
The reason for not being able to move the number across the road is that the new
block has no telephone infrastructure - or at least that is what the Openreach
system is reporting. The address does not appear on their database and a number
cannot be transferred into nothingness.
From today the old lady will not have a telephone service. The BT lady could not
have been more helpful but she did not know if the new flats would have analogue
copper lines or equipped for what BT calls Digital Voice.
When I was in the new flat nosing around I saw that the telephone sockets were of the old
RJ11 type that has been in use for many years but there were also some RJ45
(Ethernet) face plates dotted around without any obvious sign of a socket behind
them. I thought that was a bit odd in this day and age but there was an Openreach fibre termination inside a utility cupboard.
The best the BT lady could do was initiate a new installation but with no
knowledge of whether it would be digital or analogue and given BT’s (and Virginְ’s) commitment last
week to not force Digital Voice on elderly customers in future it becomes a complex situation.
The system will now generate a new phone number because of Openreach’s failure
to register the new address on their system leaving BT without any firm
information which may have helped resolve the situation.
All they could offer is that if and when a new line is installed some time in
January with any luck they will be able to swap the number back to what it was
- if Openreach has not given it to someone else.
I am reminded that my first little telephone job in Fleet Building, Farringdon
Street EC4 (now demolished) while awaiting a more permanent appointment was number
allocation. All card index, no computer. The policy was not to reissue an old
number until it had been dormant for at least six months to minimise the flow of
wrong number calls. Nowadays it is in the lap of the Gods. Does any service ever improve over time?
If I had more notice of this impasse I could have temporarily ported the number
to my friendly ISP for safe-keeping.
Another thing I learned. The Wolvercote towers are not to be demolished straight
away. Peabody plan to fill them with short term lets. It’s all about the money.