NTL "Technical Support" sucks...
As you may presently yourself fully be aware, my grammar sucks, but more importantly I've been having problems with "Document Contains No Data' errors since coming back from uni to my NTL connection.
Anyway, today I bit the bullet and rang NTL's tech support, ostensibly to complain about their piss-poor quality of service. I know it's their fault because the exact same PC & Network setup works fine on my Telewest connection at uni.
Anyway, after spending 10 minutes convincing some random employee that I had indeed patched my PC to protect against the Blaster worm (They won't offer tech support if you haven't) I got put through to the 'real' tech support people.
Everything was going great up until he asked me to go to Tools->Internet options and I had to explain that I don't use IE. "Ah", he said, "so you use Netscape". I tried saying I used Mozilla but he didn't know what I was talking about so I just decided it was best to be creative and I said yes. "So you're using Netscape 4.7?". Not wanting to further confuse the man, I decided to keep it simple and told him I was using Netscape 7.1.
At this point he put me on hold to check something. When he came back he informed me that NTL only support IE & Netscape 4.x (!!!) so I'd have to use IE if I wanted tech support. As I knew the problem was on their end I figured I might as well go along with the IE thing because, hey, it might work.
Next came the standard questions about how I was connected to the net. I gave the standard lies about direct connections because from previous experience with NTL tech support their scripts tell them that if anyone is using a router or gateway server then you have to unplug it all and connect directly because we all know routers and gateway servers cause these problems.
Cue 10 minutes of random changing of IE settings and re-registering DLLs (Or at least pretending to). Once that had failed to help, I once again suggested that the problem was on their end because I didn't have the problem at uni - at this point he decided I must have a laptop because I used it in more than one place - but to no avail ("Nobody else is having this problem" - or at least nobody else is smart enough to know, especially as IE doesn't give any kind of error message).
Finally, after a second phase of being put on hold, I finally got what I needed - namely a list of NTL's proxy servers (Not their transparent proxy caches, but their actual proxy servers). I was then able to play proxy roulette until I found one with a reasonable load level that wasn't dropping every other connection.
Woo. Now all I have to do is pick one at random every time the problem starts recurring to essentially route myself around the traffic - something their load-balancing systems should do for me.
Spad.
Anyway, today I bit the bullet and rang NTL's tech support, ostensibly to complain about their piss-poor quality of service. I know it's their fault because the exact same PC & Network setup works fine on my Telewest connection at uni.
Anyway, after spending 10 minutes convincing some random employee that I had indeed patched my PC to protect against the Blaster worm (They won't offer tech support if you haven't) I got put through to the 'real' tech support people.
Everything was going great up until he asked me to go to Tools->Internet options and I had to explain that I don't use IE. "Ah", he said, "so you use Netscape". I tried saying I used Mozilla but he didn't know what I was talking about so I just decided it was best to be creative and I said yes. "So you're using Netscape 4.7?". Not wanting to further confuse the man, I decided to keep it simple and told him I was using Netscape 7.1.
At this point he put me on hold to check something. When he came back he informed me that NTL only support IE & Netscape 4.x (!!!) so I'd have to use IE if I wanted tech support. As I knew the problem was on their end I figured I might as well go along with the IE thing because, hey, it might work.
Next came the standard questions about how I was connected to the net. I gave the standard lies about direct connections because from previous experience with NTL tech support their scripts tell them that if anyone is using a router or gateway server then you have to unplug it all and connect directly because we all know routers and gateway servers cause these problems.
Cue 10 minutes of random changing of IE settings and re-registering DLLs (Or at least pretending to). Once that had failed to help, I once again suggested that the problem was on their end because I didn't have the problem at uni - at this point he decided I must have a laptop because I used it in more than one place - but to no avail ("Nobody else is having this problem" - or at least nobody else is smart enough to know, especially as IE doesn't give any kind of error message).
Finally, after a second phase of being put on hold, I finally got what I needed - namely a list of NTL's proxy servers (Not their transparent proxy caches, but their actual proxy servers). I was then able to play proxy roulette until I found one with a reasonable load level that wasn't dropping every other connection.
Woo. Now all I have to do is pick one at random every time the problem starts recurring to essentially route myself around the traffic - something their load-balancing systems should do for me.
Spad.
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