PShaw's lack of service, lack of reliability, and cookies

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.

Fingernails and phone calls

My fingernails are too long.  And I need a haircut.  And I can't find my soap.

Okay, so why is this the fault of Telus, Koodo, BC Hydro, Shaw, and Canada Post?  Because I've been fighting with them for a month and a half.  Not all of them for all of that time: Telus and Koodo are the worst offenders.  But, cumulatively, I have wasted hundreds of hours dealing, or attempting to deal, with these utilities, and their lack of provision of service.  And their lack of customer support.  And their lack of technical support.  And their ridiculous websites, that offered to help, but don't.

Right now, I am supposed to be in a reconciliation meeting.  But, instead, I'm sitting in another office, to avoid annoying people with the music on hold that Koodo is currently blaring at me.

I have had to waste all of this time chasing down these people.  I have had to pursue them, rather than them pursuing me.  I am, after all, paying for the services.  But alerting them to the fact that there is a problem doesn't seem create any sense of urgency in them to fix the problem.  No, as long as I am paying the bill, they don't care if I'm not getting the service I'm paying for.  If I stop paying the bill, they just stop providing any service at all.

So, my time is being wasted.  This means that I can't finish unpacking.  It means that I can't figure out how I am going to live and work in my new place.  It means that I can't set up the systems and routines that normally I would need to live and work normally.  No, instead, I am constantly on the computer, arguing with their brain-dead artificial intelligence digital agents, supposedly providing baseline support and help, and actually providing almost nothing, except to waste time until I can get to the point where I can ask to talk to an agent.  And, of course, if anything else happens in the meantime I have to ignore that and stay on the line with them, because if I end the call I have to start all over again from the beginning and go through the whole ridiculous process.  Or I'm waiting on hold on the phone, waiting for them to deign to get back to me about whatever the problem is.  Or waiting for a call back from them.  Which comes at their convenience, not mine.

So, hours and hours wasted.  I haven't been able to unpack the stuff for the bathroom.  So I can't find my nail clippers.  So my nails are getting too long.  Actually, right now that's an advantage: the problem that I'm trying to get Koodo to deal with is the fact that the phone, which, after a month and a half of trying, and three days of piecemeal transfer, that they finally got working yesterday, one day after it actually started providing service, suddenly says "Unregistered SIM."  So, at their request, while I'm away from home, and any of the tools that might help, I have to pull the SIM card out of the phone and read the serial number off to them.  So, it's a good thing that I have long nails right now.

But, otherwise, it's not great that my fingernails are too long.  And it's not great that my hair is getting too long.  I haven't had time to go to a barber shop and get my haircut.  Literally.  I mean that literally: I have not had the short period of time that it would take to get to a barber shop when it's open.  I've been on the computer, or on the phone, with one or other of these various utilities, trying to deal with the mess of problems that they themselves have created.  I haven't been able to unpack the bathroom, so I can't find my soap.  I've got one bar of soap that I'm currently using for showers in the morning, but it's getting smaller and smaller.  I do have other soap in the boxes with the bathroom stuff.  I just haven't been able to unpack the boxes yet.  I haven't had the time, even though I can do that whenever I want.  Except that whenever I'm home, it's more urgent, from the utilities perspective, that I'd be on the phone or on their websites, dealing with them.  I cannot call them at my convenience because they won't answer.  Most of the time there's no way to call them anyway.  So I have to wait for them.  And wait.  And wait.  And wait.  And if I have other meetings, or if I'm doing something else, or if I'm helping out at the food bank, and they call, I have to take the call.  Right then.  At their convenience.  I have to drop what I'm doing or they will drop the call.  And then I have to start all over again, from the beginning.

And is it a short call, to solve the problem?  Of course not.  I have been on this call, for fifty minutes.  For the first half hour, the agent was demanding all kinds of stuff like me repeating the phone number, that was the issue, again and again.  And verifying my account number, and verifying my account.  And now I'm on hold, listening to some really awful music on hold, while the agent is contacting another "specialist."  So far, I've been twenty minutes on hold.  And, if past history is any indication, before she contacts the other specialist, Koodo's phone system will decide that the call has been on old long enough, and cut it off.  And I'll have to start all over again ...

CRA

Oh, it's not just the utilities.  And it's not just Canada Post either.  Although Canada Post has contributed greatly to this mess.  Canada Post apparently, told the developer, and city hall, that the postal code ended in 5C9.  It doesn't.  So, when I went to my account, and went to update my address, and entered the correct postal code, CRA coughed on it, and wouldn't accept it.  So I had to call CRA.

CRA made this a painless process.  NOT!!!

First of all, they told me the information that I would need on hand to verify myself.  They lied.  When I called, and went through all the shenanigans to get to a point where they were going to put me through to an agent.  They told me the wait time would be an hour. Two hours later I finally got to speak to an agent.  (This becomes important, later.)  The agent was a very nice, compassionate, caring person.  Who asked for all kinds of things besides what CRA said they would ask for, in order to verify that I was who I was.  Taking considerable time in doing so.  (This becomes important, later.)

So, we started with the address change.  I told the agent that this might be a problem, since I had tried it with my account, and CRA wouldn't let me.  It had coughed, at the very beginning, on the postal code.  So I gave her the postal code, because that was what she wanted first.  (Obviously she was using exactly the same software that I was, and, predictably, got exactly the same result.)  She has better access than I do, and could override this, to a certain extent.  She was able to look up what CRA thought my postal code should be.  It's wrong, but she entered it anyway, and was then able to enter the rest of the new address.  Success!  One would think.  One would be wrong.

At this point she asked about phone numbers.  So I gave her the story leading to the fact that my old home phone number is now a cell phone.  She entered that and went straight on to bank information.  Hold on, I said, there is more information to be entered about the phone numbers.  Apparently she couldn't do that.  Or wouldn't do that.  So we verified that my bank information is still the same.  At this point, if I try to sign on with the bank, CRA probably will not let me sign on.  That's because the bank has my right postal code, and CRA has the wrong postal code.

So finally we were back to phone numbers.  And she started to ask me about phone numbers.  At which point CRA decided this phone call had gone on quite long enough, most of which was due to CRA not putting me through to an agent, and cut the agent off in mid sentence.  It was obviously the end of the day for CRA (which had happened during the long wait, and while the agent was asking all kinds of verification questions), so they just cut the call off.  And then asked me to take a survey.  To all of the points I answered completely unsatisfied.  Well, what would you do?

Koodo

 It was an act of purest optimism to have assumed it was over in the first place.

First of all, I’ve been fighting with Telus and Koodo over this for a month and a half.

I’m trying to get my Gloria’s phone number ported over to a cell phone, since Telus won’t let me move it to my new home.  (Oh, thanks awfully, Telus.  Way to support a grieving widower.)

So, after many phone calls with Telus, Telus support, Telus escalation management team, and Koodo sales and Koodo so-called “support,” over many days, and Koodo sending me to a Koodo store to get a new SIM card to replace the one they said they sent me and never did, Koodo *FINALLY* got the number ported over to a cell phone.  (Yes, an existing cell phone that I had with another service.)  (That happened piecemeal over three days.)

So, *ONE DAY* after they finally get it working, the phone is suddenly saying “Unregistered SIM”!!!

Yes, I rebooted the phone.  (No, I didn’t just restart it, I powered it down, pulled the battery, and started it up again.)  No luck.

Yes, I pulled and reseated the SIM card.  Doesn’t help.

So, I go to the Koodo help pages.  They don’t help.  They try to send me to interactive tutorials for my phone, except they don’t list my phone.

So, I go to the Koodo Assist Digital Rep.  This AI is even more brain-dead than the one at Shaw.  It keeps asking questions, and presenting help pages that don’t relate and don’t help until you tell it “stupid ai,” at which point it will *finally* offer to connect you with an agent for a callback.  At which point it asks you to describe the problem, and if you mention *anything* it thinks it has in it’s peurile database, it will terminate the setup for a callback, and start presenting useless “help” pages again!  (Oh, and how am I supposed to get a callback, when your phone service doesn’t work because it says “Unregistered SIM”?!?)

Do not annoy grieving widowers. They are already mad at the world, and now have lots of time, and no restraining influences to prevent them from publishing the most detailed and damaging reviews of your non-service.

Facebook, email addresses, and insecurity

Someplace else (and, right now, I can't recall where) I have written about the fact that an awful lot of people think they own the email address rslade@gmail.com.  There's a Roger, there's a Richard, there's a Rachel, there's a guy in Hawaii who owns a Toyota, there is someone wanting a divorce in England, there are many people who have signed up for mailing lists for many things, or given, as their contact email address, rslade@gmail.com.  They, of course, don't get any of the email they signed up for.  It all comes to me.

Somebody signed up for Facebook with that email address.  Somehow, Facebook believed him.  With the result that although I have a number of email addresses that I can use to access Facebook, I cannot add that address to my list of addresses on Facebook.

On the other hand, I *can* use that address to log on to Facebook.  And it logs me on to my account.  Which, if they have allowed someone *else* to use that address to verify or create an account, is terminally weird ...

Clocked

I also found that the big wall clock, that Gloria had in her sewing room, had not been working for a while, so I put a battery in it.  It was working.  (I also put a battery in the anniversary clock, and it was working, and still is.)  Anyway, when I checked it a bit later, it had stopped working.  I thought that maybe I had chosen a dud battery, so I replaced the battery, and that didn't work.  So I replaced the battery with another battery, and that didn't work.  The only thing I can think of is that the clock, having woken up, and finally realize that it's mistress is nowhere around, has given up and died.

I've gone and checked around various places, and pretty much decided on a large, plain clock at Walmart.  But I haven't yet thrown out the clock that isn't working, and haven't yet gone and bought the replacement.  Partly because I've had an oddly busy week, but partly because I haven't yet thrown out "Gloria's" clock ...

Whirlpool, and other natural disasters and dangers

 One of the deficiencies in my new place is that it has a new Whirlpool washer and dryer.  There are some problems with the washer, but they are relatively minor, and relatively easy to diagnose and understand, although annoying.  The dryer, however, seems to have a relatively fatal flaw.

In terms of the washer, as noted, having done one cycle, when I asked it for an extra rinse, it showed me an error code, and then refused to do anything.  The owner's manual, and quick start guide, do not mention anything about this error code, but then neither has any section on troubleshooting.  I could not, initially, look up any additional documentation or any issues regarding Whirlpool washing machines in this particular error code, because, of course, I did not have access to the Internet. [Sigh.]

It wasn't stuff impeding the door.  I got this Loc code and it does absolutely nothing.

When I finally got access to the Internet, a quick Google search cleared it up almost instantly.  Apparently, Whirlpool decided you need a feature that locks the washing machine.  It doesn't lock the door, it just prevents the washing machine from either operating or changing operation.  And it's holding down the extra rinse button too long that locks the machine!!!!

For the dryer, I cannot find a cycle that will finish drying.  Anything.  I haven't yet put anything into the dryer, that hasn't required multiple cycles to complete.  It's annoying.  Most of the time when I put in a mixed set of underwear socks and t-shirts, it's possibly two or three cycles, before everything is done.  But, everything does get done, sort of, and I can finish off the last few items, that aren't yet dry, while I am sorting those that have been through a couple of cycles, and are dry.

Yesterday I did a blanket.  It's a cotton blanket, and I put it in by itself, to wash, because I figured it might be too bulky for the washer to handle by itself.  It looks like I was wrong, in terms of the washing.  I probably should have put in a couple of towels, or something, to balance it out, because the washer seemed to find it a real struggle to spin it dry.  It tried, for about twenty minutes, in the last minute of a more than two hour cycle, to spin it dry.  After twenty minutes, it hadn't even come close.  I finally hauled it out, hauled it over to the shower stall, and manually wrung the blanket dry(-ish).  After I had wrung it out, I put it in the dryer.  The dryer didn't appear to have any trouble tumbling it.  But a 1 hour cycle completed in only 10 minutes.  And the blanket wasn't remotely dry.  I tried a slightly different cycle.  That didn't dry the blanket.  I tried the towels setting.  I tried the bulky items setting.  I tried heavy duty.  I tried extra temperature, and more time settings on the dryer.  I ran it through half a dozen different cycles.  Finally, after a dozen or more cycles, which all seemed to end much earlier than the panel said they would (interrupted by the fact that I did have other things to do yesterday), the blanket was dry.  But it took several hours to do it, and a lot of time, pulled away from other things, to restart the dryer, sometimes on a different setting, to do the drying job.  This is supposed to be an automatic dryer.  It's supposed to be automatic to save me time.  Instead, it's pulling me away from whatever I'm doing, when it stops early, in order to start it again, and get it to it complete it's assigned job.  You know that saying, you had one job?  Well, Whirlpool, you had one job, with regard to the dryer.  You are falling down on the job.  I would not recommend Whirlpool dryers.  At all.  They just don't work.  They just don't do what they are supposed to do.