Wow. who’d have thought. A fully updated Sufi Calendar courtesy koonj.
March 2007
Monthly Archive
Mon 26 Mar 2007
Fri 23 Mar 2007
I am not quite sure why, despite many many distasteful and frustrating experiences with ISPs and other internet related companies/firms, I haven’t spoken about them as often as I should have. But nevertheless the state of affairs of ISPs has improved a little only in all these years. That improvement has only come in the form of lower (but not low enough to meet a commoner’s pocket for broadband connection) tariffs and more options. The sad face of totally defunct customer support, extremely irritating and incompetent staff, higher fee of broadband as compared with most of developing and developed nations is still there.
The big companies could rightfully be accused of their complacency, downright poor customer support and bad QoS of internet connectivity. Cyber Net is one of them. Yes, the largest ISP of the country against whom little has been spoken for various reasons.
Few weeks ago, one of my clients told me their internet connection was cut because of “non-payment” and they had paid quarterly to CyberNet already. When I called their customer support out of curiosity, they said all 2GB has been consumed after which they try to reimburse the money from remaining balance and keep “using” until there’s not enough balance from client’
s side. Not that I usually like any ISP for that matter but even though something like this is beyond my call-for-duty or job-description for my services to my clients, but I said to myself, ‘what the hell, let’s give it to them’. After yelling and screaming my lungs out at the poor lady who posed someone responsible so I don’t really consider her to be as poor. The idiots didn’t bother to inform my client about all of this. And guess what? my client has been their customer for past 10 years. Yeah, that’s right. 10 fucking years. Not only that when I insisted and persuaded my client to switch their ISP immediately (at least MAXCom seemed a little better) they refused to terminate the connection.
Now what happened was wastage of lots of precious hours of mine and some real-good bitching again from yours truly. I don’t give a fuck if they think I am too wild and indecent to be a technology professional but what I do give a fuck to is their freaking customer-support and how they are running a goddamn biggest ISP of the country without giving a damn to a customer’s woes. CyberNet refused to terminate the connection unless we provide them a typed-fax with enough sound reasons. That was exactly what we were told. I mean come on, grow some balls (and some brain) and start believing on email esp. when you’re all about oh-so-cutting-edge-technology buzzwords, suckers. Anyhow, not to tarnish my client’s reputation and name in all of this, I wrote a letter myself and sent them through fax. I am copying all of that below:
Cyber Internet Services,
www.cyber.net.pk
Dear Sir,
This is to notify you that we wish to discontinue our Cyber DSL service at the earliest. The account details are as follows:
Name: **********
Customer # ********
Acct id ******
Tel. No: 56*****
As per your request of furnishing sound and enough reasons for your record as to why we want to discontinue CyberDSL Services, here’re some of them:
1- We have been customers of Cyber Internet Services for over last 10 years. And it’s very disheartening to see how worse every year Cyber Internet Services has grown under performing despite the needs of our business which keeps growing.
2- We have faced many customer-support related issues where it has been nothing but a distressful and distasteful experience every time we faced some problem and needed some clarification or adequate support.
3- Despite our record of paying Cyber Internet Services quarterly or bi-annually for all these years, Cyber Internet Services never (not even in a single instance in over 10 years) ever bothered to notify through email, phone or in person the date of expiry of our connection despite many claims customer support representatives have made.
4- We fail to understand why Cyber Internet Services don’t honor email communication as a legal and authentic source and still rely and force its customers to call, fax or still worse, visit in person for small changes in account settings and further information.
5- The tariff charges and bandwidth limitations of 2GB by Cyber Internet Services are too much despite many growing ISPs providing equal or better services in the same amount of fee with unlimited bandwidth. We have notified many a times to Cyber Internet Services customer support about this irrelevant package plan which is too much a constraint on money but it looks like Cyber Internet Services would only care for big corporate giants and once again the small customer gets the beating and lick his wounds.
6- The last but not the least of all reasons, we consider it our prerogative to continue or discontinue any internet related services however we damn please and we want to use Cyber Internet Services no more with or without justifiable reasons.
So discontinue our account ASAP as we wish to use another DSL service.
Regards,
**** ***
I am waiting for a response from their side now. It’s such an act of shame that such big companies have to act so mindlessly and so devoid of any fucking human touch. And yet every friggin’ company these days is claiming to be “truly yours”. Well, just like the fabric of love, emotions and concern has been portrayed, one shouldn’t get surprised.
Fri 23 Mar 2007
On recent developments (or I should say deteriorations) of Bob Woolmer’s death, the speculations, commentary and opinion from various local news agencies and local public:
I have been equally if not more avid follower and speaker of freedom of speech. Since I am known to be pretty much ill-mannered, bad-mouth, downright rude and things of that sort, I do assure you that some of that could be seen in positive light of “freedom of speech” more than anything else.
And yet there’re times when the same “freedom of speech” becomes a curse. This is one of those times and I wanted to say (in public) to all of these people so farigh sitting on their sorry lazy asses whole day long giving all sorts of intelligent to completely irrational speculations: Give them (investigative teams) a fucking chance, will ya?
