Welcome to Nowhere

I used to be in love with TekSavvy. I recommended the thing to anyone looking to escape the clutches of Bell Canada. Their plans were awesome, their service rocked my world, the lack of bandwidth restrictions made my geek heart do the happy dance. And on the rare occasion I had to deal with tech support, which wasn’t very often or for very long, they were rock solid beyond anything. I delt with their other departments only a tiny little handful of times, but even those were mostly all aces. The love afair ended a week and a half ago.

I’ve recently taken in a roommate. The afore mentioned roommate also used to come with TekSavvy. We’d planned to keep both services running, and attempt to combine them in such a way that internet speeds would go from borderline awesome to wicked awesome in 3 seconds flat. We called at the beginning of November, roughly, shortly after we’d escentially decided to give this whole roommate thing a try. It went back and forth between yes we can and no we can’t, and some very odd and less than amusing combinations of the two. We spoke each to several different people when we got our hands on these interesting combinations.

One thing lead to another, we wound up bouncing to the manager queue. Or rather, we thought we were bouncing to the manager queue–more on that later. Finally, we were getting something vaguely resembling consistency. We got sent to Elizabeth, who told us she was a supervisor in the sales department. Suddenly, we saw things get cleared up, straightened out, and appropriately beaten into submission. Bell got told they’d be doing what we wanted, when we wanted, and not to ask questions. We were ready to go, and all we had to do was show up on the day of the changeover. Except no, not really.

About four days before the day services were supposed to be switched over, and the day before Shane was due to jump a bus up this way, I wake up to a message on the answering machine. This message, from Alexandra, escentially undid what we’d just gotten everything but written confirmation was going to happen. Naturally, it involved a callback. And that’s when things got a little more interesting.

Apparently, not only was Bell not, as we were previously told, going to do what we wanted–on account of this was to do with an install that has nothing to do with any of Bell’s services, but for the last two weeks before this, we hadn’t, in fact, been speaking to a supervisor in the sales department. I still don’t think we were speaking to anyone managerial when we got the callback, though she claimed to be more senior than Elizabeth–whatever the hell that means. Needless to say, we were significantly less than enthusiastic to be having that conversation. We promptly canceled both our services right there in favour of Primus, who I’ve had dealings with before and left because I had a better offer.

Apparently we’re not alone on the list of folks who’ve run up against the Elizabeth issue. She’s told at least one other customer she was a manager as well, and made claims similar to that which she made to us–this customer has also, since, been corrected by someone else, including on Elizabeth’s managerial status. While I can’t say whether or not that customer’s contemplating the big switch, but it’s acts like this that ended up turning what I saw as an absolutely perfect service into something from which I wanted to run, quickly, in the opposite direction.

So long, TekSavvy. It’s been fun. In this case, you can thank your own customer service folks for the bad taste in my mouth. I do. And as of tomorrow, I won’t even have that.