Winge about ADSL hassles

I haven’t blogged in a while, and there is a damn good reason why. I have been in the middle of moving house. My partner and I have recently purchased a fantastic place in Fitzroy (inner city Melbourne).
The moving process is quite stressful, but I must confess I wasn’t expecting so much hassle with my ADSL line. We needed to get a new phone line at our new place, and so of course we had to switch our ADSL plan to that new line. We made this request on Monday the 8th of august, and waited…. Now I was under the impression that this would take up to a week. I have to confess that I think this is a particularly ridiculous amount of time considering that there is not really all that much work involved. They have to test the line, and then re-route my connection to my ISP. Sounds like all of about half an hour to me, and the fact that I had paid $99 for the work to be done, I would think that Telstra would be able to afford to resource this role fairly well….. We are still waiting for this to happen. On calling my ISP, he gave me the standard response of “Telstra say that it will take between 5 and 10 working days”. This is completely ridiculous, I’m an IT professional and because I move I can’t have an ADSL connection for 2 weeks. I do have dial up access, but that’s not a real internet connection…. Ever tried downloading webcasts and podcasts over dial up, it’s plain infuriating. To make matters worse, they actually wouldn’t give me any specific details of the status of my request because the my previous phone line was registered under my partners name. This I was told was for security reasons…. Lets see now, the guy at the help desk of my ISP had already asked me my address, the account name and my phone number, he then proceeded to ask me if I was Androniki Papapetrou, my partner (obviously not realizing that Androniki is a greek girls name (the male equivalent being Andronicus)). If at this point Id’ve said “Yes that’s me” he would have proceeded to divulge the information I required, but stupid honest me said “No that’s my partner”. So after he insisted that he wouldn’t tell me for security reasons, I got my partner to ring. I had to tell her our account name as she didn’t know that, and when she rang the questions they asked to verify that she was who she said she was….. account name, address and telephone number. Hmmmm top notch security there guys, if this information was genuinely sensitive, then we’re in a lot of trouble here. I think this incident raises a lot of questions about security. I am a firm believer in privacy, but if you really need to identify which pieces of information should be secure and then secure them appropriately, the rest can just be broadcast on your website…. It’ll save people so much frustration.
The latest on our ADSL connection is that it should be ready by Friday….. thanks Telstra.