Being Mr. Kenny

In fact, it’s worse: the woman is a personification of a lie. She suggests that setting up the service she represents is easy and, indeed, pleasurable. In fact it is neither.

I’m talking about Ellie West, of course, the current mascot of Telewest Broadband. We set up an account with them about a week ago. All went well and I’m currently using a Telewest connection to blog this little diatribe, so why the venom?

Well, partly because it’s fun to write in this style, but also partly because the man at Telewest Broadband to whom I spoke today was a brainless cretin. A brainless cretin, I say!

The first hint that there might be an error came shortly after setting up the account. I opened Outlook Express (which had been configured to receive Telewest email — against my will I might add) only to be greeted by 250 emails addressed to a Mr Paul Angel. None of us in the house have any idea who on earth that poor person is; the only thing we do know is that he has now lost 250 unread emails forever, going back about two years (not to worry, though, he obviously doesn’t use the account if he’s only getting 250 emails in two years).

Anyway, I’ve been trying for the past week to set up the wireless router. These are notorious for being horrible to set up (and from experience I know them to be horrible to use once you’ve got the damn things working — but these joys are mine to look forward to).

I have tried phoning tech support for the router: I got a man with a lovely Dutch accent who told me it might be my firewall, and failing that I should just switch the router and the modem off, and go and wait in a darkened room for things to sort themselves out.

I also tried Telewest’s tech support, but I got as far as giving him our address and username before being told that our username, and indeed our account, didn’t exist. I politely informed him that this was very interesting, since we have quite happily been enjoying the connection for the past week, using the username I gave him.

He, then, laughed at me! The cheek! The nerve! The bumbling incompetence! I’m only sorry that I didn’t take his name so that I could do a quick petition amongst fellow customers to get him sacked. I mean, I’m sure it couldn’t be too hard to get into their database if emails to some guy we’ve never heard of are being delivered to our mailbox. Heck, I bet they send it out with the monthly newsletter.

So the saga shall continue. My housemate has now got to phone Telewest to get them to a) sort out the stupid crap regarding the account being mangled and b) authorise me to phone up tech support and get them to answer questions. I tell you now, Ellie West, apart from having a terrible, terrible name, is a brazen liar and a whore, and I already hate the whole advertising campaign.

Update: Well it turns out this saga has a happy ending! See: In which I eat my words!