Join Telkom’s 10210 keyhole club and get squeezed through
I’VE BEEN having problems with Telkom – but then who has hasn’t? We are all part of a country-wide club.
As individuals I think they try their best, especially if you are lucky enough to come face to face with them, or even when they are patiently giving you instructions on how to solve your ADSL problem over the phone.
But it’s the endless waiting for help after being squeezed through what one sufferer, Jennifer Shields of Knysna in an e-mail to me, called the “10210 keyhole”, and forced to listen to dreadful music and marketing messages, that can actually turn a peace-loving person into a homicidal maniac.
She needed assistance in getting an ADSL line installed on behalf of someone ill with Parkinson’s. In the course of 36 calls she gave her details and story over and over again, never able to speak to someone she had spoken to before, and none of them able to agree on what her problem was.
“Eventually I had to go to the Telkom office in person and be belligerent to get someone senior to speak to me. As it happens, Terence at Claremont offices was helpful and calm in the face of extreme frustration and anger, and did all he could.”
Mike, when he finally answered my call on Sunday, was equally helpful. Our brand-new router installed by Telkom in Hermanus, had gone on the blink (literally – that bloody red eye), and Mike tried to take me through the process to identify the problem. But each time I clicked as instructed, my computer informed me this was not possible so long as I remained off-line.
I explained to Mike that if I could go on-line, I wouldn’t have phoned him in the first place. It was a Catch-22 situation. Somehow he steered me round that difficulty, and decided I had the wrong user-name and password, though how to find the right ones? After an hour we gave up. I had a towel round my neck, to absorb the sweat pouring off my head from the effort, and thanked him for his extreme patience in dealing with a tech- nological Neanderthal.
Next day Telkom sent round a technician, Wimpie, who struggled for nearly two hours before he, too, gave up. At least the problem was identified, even if no one could solve it.
Meanwhile I went off to write my column on the computer of a kind neighbour, Sue Grylls. Her surname always reminds me of the graffiti on a wall: “Help dyslexic boys.” Underneath someone had added: “What about us grils?”
As usual I digress. On Tuesday I gave up on Telkom. Instead I phoned MWeb, our service provider, and after 10 minutes of listening to their own blurb, Mohammed came on the line.
I explained the situation. He quickly took me through the process I was now becoming familiar with. And then, a bit like Van der Merwe who, with his head on the block, looked up at the malfunctioning guillotine and told the executioner “I think I can spot your problem”, Mohammed said he too had spotted the problem, but first wanted to speak to my wife. Apparently some things only a woman can understand, especially when an account is in her name.
Mohammed cleverly worked out that the user-name was my wife’s. And so was the password. We typed them in, and hey presto! we were back on line.
“You’re an angel,” she told Mohammed, who modestly denied the charge.
But there’s still nothing angelic about Telkom, no matter now much it flaps its wings.