Okay, I should probably, since I promised to, screed on Shaw, as well as Telus and Koodo.
I have had Shaw before. I hesitate to say that I have had Shaw service before, since "service" tends to be a questionable statement when dealing with Shaw. We had Shaw Internet and cable television before. Shaw's total service, both television and Internet, would go out on a fairly regular basis. This was kind of interesting, since Shaw went out more often than the power did. When I moved to North Vancouver, I had an uninterruptible power supply, or UPS. I needed it so little that the first time that I actually *did* need it, the battery had completely died, and it was completely useless. So I bought another UPS. And the first time that I needed it, it was so old that the battery had completely died. So I stopped buying UPSes in North Vancouver. Where we were in Lynn Valley, it was protected enough that we very, very seldom had power outages.
So the fact that Shaw went out on a pretty regular basis (usually right in the middle of a Canucks game) came as a surprise. I soon came to expect it. As well as the fact that technical support, from Shaw, was completely useless.
At first I tried calling Shaw. (This was long enough ago that you actually could call Shaw on the phone. You didn't get any better support, mind you, but you could call them on the phone.) Later on, you had to go through a sort of a chat function, and you encountered their virtual agent. This is a brain-dead piece of artificial intelligence (well artificial stupidity is probably a more accurate term), that never provided anything in the way of assistance. It was just a roadblock that you had to go through before you could get on a chat function with an actual agent.
I soon learned that it was much more effective to complain about Shaw and Shaw's lousy service in public. If you post about the problem that you are having on Twitter, Shaw's so-called "technical support" will actually contact you. Mind you, eventually they caught on to that trick. They now have an automated bot that answers, to any negative comment, that they are sorry that you are experiencing some kind of difficulty, and please contact technical support, including a URL which will, you guessed it, connect you with the virtual agent bot. And then we are through to the game of trying to outthink the support bot, and get it to give you an agent.
Getting through to an agent isn't all that difficult on Shaw. All you have to do is specify your problem, in very minor detail, so that the bot is not able to pick out an irrelevant and extraneous term that you have referenced, and point you to one of their completely useless "help" pages. I should mention the help pages: they are no help. You can go to the help pages, which are mostly sales pitches for various products, and attempts to get you to upgrade. For any particular problems that you have, I have never found a solution on their so-called help pages.
So, as I say, you don't give the bot lots of verbiage, because that gives them more opportunities to find something useless to fob you off with. No, what you do is specify your problem in the least possible detail. The bot cannot figure out what to do with it, and will eventually put you through to a human agent.
Now you can be completely forgiven for thinking that these human agents are just other bots. For one thing, it takes them forever to respond. I strongly suspect that these agents may be dealing with as many as 10 calls at a time. That might explain (with the emphasis on "might"), why it takes them absolutely forever to respond to anything that you type in. They will ask you what the problem is. You will again repeat the problem. They will say that they are going back to read your interaction with the bot to get more details on the problem. They will then disappear, or at least nothing will happen on the chat screen, for quite some time. Time enough for them to do a round of a half a dozen other chat calls that they are dealing with, and come back without having learned any further details of your problem. They will then ask you a bunch of stupid questions meant to verify whether you are in fact who you are. Eventually we will get down to the actual problem. At that point they will again ask you to detail the problem, and you can then, finally, provide details on what the problem is. They will then suggest some action that you can take. It's probably an action you have already taken. Or they may ask details about your computer, your browser, anything that they can to extend the time that the call is taking. By this time half an hour may have gone by, and we haven't even started to get into an actual solution to the problem, or, indeed, figuring out what the problem actually is. It takes forever to get through a support call with Shaw. Expect to spend a minimum of two hours on a call about a problem of any significance. And that's if one of the things that they suggest isn't unplugging your modem. Or some other suggested activity that is going to lose you the call. If the call is lost, you have to start all over again from the beginning. And that includes if the agent says that they need to check with sales, or technical support, or another area of technical support, or a specialist, or anybody else in another area of Shaw. If this happens you will never hear from them again. They will be gone for a considerable period of time. Long enough, that the brain-dead support chatbot will figure that the line is dead, and will come on the chat screen and start up the process all over again. Again, it's not too hard to bluff out the chat bot, and get it to direct you to an agent. But it won't be the same agent. And, of course, the new agent will have absolutely no knowledge of what has been going on. And the first agent will not have put any notes into your file. So, even when the new agent says that they are going to read up on your file and determine what has been going on, they are lying to you. This just gives them more time to get around to the other dozen people that they are trying to bluff through on support calls, under the premise that they are reading up, in detail, on what your problem is. When they come back, you will have to go through the whole process again: verification, explaining the problem, explaining that, yes, you have performed the simplistic suggestions that they are giving you and that they didn't work, and all the rest of it.
Shaw's technical support is not in the business of providing technical support. The purpose of Shaw's technical support, quite obviously, is simply to keep you on the line, increasingly frustrated, until you just give up. You realize that this is an exercise in futility, and that there is no point in even attempting to figure out how to explain, in sufficient detail, to Shaw's technical support, what the problem is, and how to follow their fairly simplistic directions to try various things to rectify that problem. Pretty much nothing is going to work. It's not intended to work. It's just to keep you busy, and increasingly frustrated, until you give up, and stop bothering them.
One of the problems that I am calling Shaw about is the ridiculous, and pretty terrible, latency that it shows in opening web pages. I very much doubt that anyone can do anything about that: it just shows overall poor service on Shaw's part, which is par for the course.
However, the other one shows bad design on Shaw's part. I am trying to use Shaw's webmail to access my Shaw email accounts. And the Shaw Webmail web page either refuses to open at all, or, once it comes up with the login screen, it then refuses to access Shaw's login, or authentication, server. At first, Shaw's technical support tried to make out that this had to do with my choice of browser. It doesn't. It has to do with Shaw's use of cookies. One of the Shaw technical support people let's slip the information that I could try clearing the cache. That worked. But, my browser allows me to clear more selectively. It doesn't matter if you clear the cache. It doesn't matter if you clear recent history. You need to clear the cookies. I don't know why Shaw gets hung up on their own old cookies. But obviously they do. And, yes, I have tested and confirmed that. So, all that I need to do when I am trying to reach Shaw's webmail, is to clear all cookies.
Unfortunately, all cookies applies to cookies other than Shaw's. Lots of other companies use cookies to maintain authentication and identification, over time. This allows you to sign on once, and use those pages somewhat later. Unless, of course, you have tried to reach Shaw's webmail, and have had to clear all cookies. Then you are out of luck. That has cleared all the logins, and all the identification, and all the authentication verification, for everyone. Including, most noticeably, WhatsApp. I use WhatsApp a lot. I don't particularly like WhatsApp, but the girls do. And the Deltassist gardening crew does. And one of my grief groups does. So, I have to be up on WhatsApp. And, since I am not one of those people who walks around with my cell phone welded to my head, I keep a window, for WhatsApp, open on my desktop computer. WhatsApp has recently made it slightly easier to do this. (Slightly being the operative word.) When the cookies are cleared, you have to go to the home screen on WhatsApp, select the drop-down menu from the three dots at the upper right, select linked devices, and then select the button to link a device. I say that it is slightly easier than it used to be, because it used to be that setting up a WhatsApp session on your browser window disabled WhatsApp on your phone. At least it doesn't do that anymore.
But it does require cookies. And, when you clear the cookies for Shaw, you clear the cookies for WhatsApp as well. And then I have to go, get my phone, back out to the main WhatsApp screen, etc, etc. It's a nuisance. But then, so is Shaw.
It's not just the Webmail that Shaw has problems with. You want to check out your account? How much you owe them? How much you are going to be billed? You want to look up technical support? Good luck. You can't sign on. The same weird cookie-based conflict that makes Shaw's Webmail so problematic is fully present when you try and log in to Shaw to do, well, pretty much anything. "The site cannot be found." (Great advertisement for your communications reliability, Shaw.) "This page has expired." (In the eleven seconds it took me to type in my password?) And, as with Webmail, clearing cookies fixes the problem. It's just that it fixes everything else, as well. "The Economist" digital access that I paid a ton of money for? Gone.
Ceterum censeo Shaw delendam esse.
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