Right, long time no update, so a couple of inconsequential things to forestall any complaints from my half-dozen readers. Firstly, following on from the launch of They Work For You, here's a silly web application that lets you graph how often certain words or phrases are used by our elected representatives.
It's not clear that this is at all useful but it offers some vaguely interesting insights. For instance, a search for `in the fullness of time' suggests that, per unit MP, Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs are slightly more prone to cliché than are Labour MPs (this surprised me quite a lot, actually). Less surprisingly, it turns out that war (red) is more popular than peace (blue):
Similarly, MPs find guns (red) much more interesting than butter (blue):
despite ongoing controversy over the Common Agricultural Policy.
And, if you're in any doubt as to who the real villain is, this plot may answer the question:
And the second thing? Further adventures in the world of British Customer Service. I am trying to get a telephone line installed by BT. Naturally, in this wired internet age, this simple procedure is scheduled to take two weeks. The CIA World Factbook seems no longer to quote the average waiting time for getting a phone line set up in different countries, instead telling me useful factlets such as that Angola has a grand total of seven internet-connected computers, but in any case I'm sure waiting two weeks for a line to be installed puts Britain firmly in the ranks of the TPLACs. Anyway, while trying to get some sense out of BT, I discovered a useful (if trivial) trick, which I pass on for the benefit of anyone else in the unhappy position of trying to get a phone line from them.
I called their `customer service' line, and was asked by the answering machine to type in the telephone number about which I was calling. So I did that (they assign a phone number before the line is connected), and the soothing voice on the other end explained to me that no orders were scheduled for this account, and invited me to press `1' to report a fault. Presumably it meant a fault with the phone line, rather than with BT's ordering system, but in any case dialling `1' just got the response that their `customer service' office was closed. Going back through the procedure, I tried entering my `account number' instead of my phone number but this just caused the thing to tell me that I'd made a mistake. But typing in the phone number of the customer service line immediately got me the response,
Sorry, a technical problem has occurred and you need to speak to a customer advisor.
and put me through to a Real Human Being immediately.
Funny -- I thought I'd need to speak to a customer advisor even in the absence of a technical fault. Oh well....
Comments
Posted by Anthony, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 10:02 (link):
The trick for BT is apparantly (and if it's true I'll be spectacularly impressed) to email the Chief Executive, Ben Verwaayen. A few months ago Private Eye was taking the piss out of Verwaayen who said in an interview that the most rewarding thing about being CEO of BT was helping solve individual customers problems when they emailled him. Private Eye naturally scoffed at the absurd notion that a CEO would deal personally with individual punters concerns - and ever since their letters page keeps getting letters from members of the public saying they emailled Verwaayen and he solved their problems.
I'm dubious until someone I know gets a problem dealt with by Verwaayen, but I guess it's worth a go - ben.verwaayen@bt.com
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 11:19 (link):
Good idea. Well, let's see what he says (if anything).
Posted by Miss Sigal Kellermann, Thursday, 15 December 2005 12:09 (link):
Dear Sir REF: Tel No. 01737 778826 broadband connection (2nd letter - NO REPLY RECEIVED)
I am very disappointed to note that, despite my recent letter which I sent on the 22nd November 2005, you have failed to show the courtesy of a reply or acknowledgement. This is in spite of the letter being sent by recorded delivery. In the first instance I would be grateful for an acknowledgement detailing what you intend to do to address my grievance. I expect to hear from you very soon. I include the original letter, indented below for your reference.
I write to complain about poor service for my broadband connection which has caused me considerable inconvenience in both time and money.
At the start of November this year (2005) I requested BT to downgrade my broadband package to Option 1. I was informed at the time that this would be carried out on the 3rd November 2005.
On the 3rd, the phone line went completely dead but was fixed the following day. However, on the 7th November, the line went dead again and was not corrected until the 17th November; a ten day period with no internet connection. During this period I tried repeatedly to get hold of your customer services - a process I found to be very frustratingly time-consuming and compounded by being cut off twice Once I did get put through to support staff however, I did find their assistance helpful. As an internet developer working from home a great deal of the time, this ordeal constituted a huge blow to my daily operations and caused me to incur additional travelling costs in order to work. I also incurred costs in contacting your customer service department and not an inconsiderable amount of my time. As such I am left deeply disappointed at the poor level of service I have experienced as a BT customer by requesting such a seemingly simple change in service.
I await your speedy reply.
Yours faithfully,
Sigal Kellermann
Posted by Anthony, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 10:07 (link):
Heh. On the PITT, if you do a normalised search for "space" the Liberal Democrats have lots of big peaks over and above other parties - presumably from Lembit Opik's one man campaign to make us aware of the threat of incoming meteorities. (Meteorites draws a blank, but I'm probably spelling it wrong)
Posted by Iain J Coleman, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 10:10 (link):
Try "asteroid". In this field, we more usually talk about asteroid impacts than meteorite impacts.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 11:18 (link):
Not many mentions of `asteroid', either, perhaps slightly surprisingly. My guess is that some of the mentions of `space' are Beagle-2 related, and most of the others not related at all. Searching for the term on TheyWorkForYou reveals mainly discussion of urban space, floor space and other kinds of non-Opik space. The mentions for `asteroid' are all from LibDem and Labour, the latter perhaps from Lord Sainsbury who I believe also takes some interest in these matters? Presumably the Tories are more concerned about other sorts of cataclysm, like a ban on fox-hunting or houses being built in Kent.
Francis (he about?) expressed some interest in doing a search interface for TWFY using some similar kind of graph, which would let you jump directly to the results. That would be pretty cool.
Posted by Francis Irving, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 21:26 (link):
Yes, I'm here somewhere. Plotting the terms as search results might work quite well. Certainly, in our early experiments it let you find debates quickly. Does anyone know of any websites which plot term frequency with date, perhaps in a historgram, and let you click through? Ideally with mouse hover showing the document excerpts below. A well done example might inspire us to actually do it. Adding date to the search on TheyWorkForYou is high up our priority list.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Wednesday, 23 June 2004 11:29 (link):
Well, the thing that gave me the idea was those plots of word-usage-by-time in the archive.org search which Brewster Kahle demoed (or at least referred to) in his NotCon talk. I don't know where that interface is, though -- I can't find it (from a very brief look) on the archive.org site.
Posted by Iain J Coleman, Wednesday, 23 June 2004 10:25 (link):
Presumably, the Labour contribution is Lord Sainsbury, as Science Minister, replying to Lembit.
Posted by Andrew Duffin, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 12:24 (link):
I'm told that the way to get service from these abominable automated systems is to press NO KEYS AT ALL. After a bit of time the system (allegedly) assumes you have a pulse-dialling phone which it can't interact with, so it puts you through to a real person.
I have never tried this but it sounds plausible.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 22 June 2004 13:19 (link):
Yeah, this sometimes works (I used to actually have a pulse-dialling-only phone!). Unfortunately those are now so uncommon that more modern automated systems just sit there prompting you to press a bloody key every ten seconds. And I was calling BT's `freephone' number from my mobile, so waiting for the answerphone to time out would have cost me £much.
Posted by Tom Steinberg, Monday, 28 June 2004 16:02 (link):
Right at the start of mySociety my ex-flatmate and I set up a wiki (hosted on our ADSL) to list the keypresses required to speak to a real human for a number of different companies. It is no longer online, and was never publicised, but I think that it is really worth doing more seriously, perhaps with the help of NTK for publicity, and possibly alongside a wiki containing the home addresses of all snailmail spamhaus CEOs, so that you can just add a "please forward to" sticker on the front of everything you get.
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