Been having a spot of trouble with Virgin Media over the last couple of days. The Internet connection was not working last night. I looked at the diagnostics on the cable modem so assumed it was some infrastructure problem outside which would get sorted soon enough.

After a couple of hours I thought I would phone the number which gives recorded messages on status and known problems. It said there was a national problem affecting some webmail access and some local trouble in Exeter and Plymouth. Nothing about Crawley.

At this point I found that Virgin have moved their broadband support onto a premium rate number: 25p a minute, plus 10p connection. I decided to give it a try and it was unobtainable. After going through many levels of menus on the normal customer services number I spoke to someone who told me the following:

1. The number was unobtainable because I have premium rate numbers barred. I vaguely remember asking for this ages ago.
2. I can only get the barring removed, or be told how to get around it by the credit department
3. The credit department do not work nights so I would have to wait until the morning.

I was getting a lot of grief from the rest of the family by now so I called the support number on my mobile and was told that there was a problem affecting the area which their engineers were working to fix. I was given a freephone number I could call to check on the status. It was the same number I called in the first place which only mentioned problems in Exeter and Plymouth.

I was going to go into a major rant about this, about how the information line is not up-to-date and if it had been I would have been spared having to call customer services but remembered I was paying for the call.

To be fair, the girl on the support line did not waste any time. She spoke quickly, but not so fast I had to ask her to repeat anything, and looked everything up quickly without keeping me on the phone for ages. Its not her fault that information available to her was not available on the information line.

I don’t mind paying for support calls, but I do resent doing it when there is a general problem I should have been able to find out about for free. Actually, when I think about it, I do mind paying! I am quite confident that I can sort out any problems with my own equipment: if there is anything wrong with the modem (which belongs to Virgin) or the connection or anything else outside my control why should I pay? With any other equipment you just report a fault and wait for an engineer to arrive. Thats what I want.