I’m annoyed.

I’m more than annoyed actually, I’m f**king livid. Rather than re-type the whole story, let me share an email I just sent to the Sky Complaints department via their website:

Dear Sky,

I’m sure you get quite sick of people whining on a daily basis, so I’ll try and keep this brief. I upgraded my parents to Sky+ in January, and since that time their TV watching pleasure has deteriorated to the point that “Sky” has become a synonymous with a swear word that rhymes with “duck”.

For the majority of the day and into the evening, none of the televisions in the house are watchable at all. We have Sky+ in the lounge (which is then distributed around the house via RF eyes), as well as two dedicated Sky Multiroom boxes in the conservatory and master bedroom. The issues described and demonstrated below, occur on all three TV’s, regardless of the box selected for viewing.

Initial troubleshooting by telephone to the Sky helpline revealed nothing untoward. Countless hours researching potential interference sources online have been checked and where necessary rectified, with absolutely no positive effect whatsoever.

An engineer visited in (April? From memory), spent 20 minutes scratching his head as the problem wasn’t evident on his arrival – quite typical – so had to go on my description of the fault alone. After much blustering, he suggested that a software update on all boxes would cure the issue, and proceeded to do exactly that. 20 minutes later, he left. Five minutes after leaving, all boxes were again unwatchable.

I have given up trying to explain the fault verbally or written, so please view the uploaded YouTube video that I think nicely shows what we have been trying to put up with for the last 6 months. After my mother had been unable to watch “Britain’s Got Talent” when it was first broadcast on Saturday, I was pleased to find it being re-broadcast on Sunday. I popped it into the Planner to record for her, and settled down to watch it myself. As you can see, I was unable to do so. I eventually switched to terrestrial, but as I have no means to be able to record that Mum has again missed out. Having watched it diligently for the last 7 weeks – as best as able anyway – it was a significant blow to her to have missed out on the final. Twice.

This clip is just over a minute long:

I, nor my parents, can take this any longer. I fail to see the point in paying £41 of my hard-earned money for something that only causes frustration, disappointment and raised blood pressure. Help!!

Kind Regards,

Me.

I hit “Submit”, only to be greeted by “The highlighted field above has an invalid value. Please correct it. Maximum length of query is 1000 characters.”

WTF? You want me to make a complaint in 1,000 characters or less? So in the end I sent this:

Apparently I am limited to 1,000 characters, so the nice email I have just written has been kindly discarded for me. Forgive me if I am now slightly more irritated than I was 10 minutes ago.

I have given up trying to explain the fault verbally or written, so please view the uploaded YouTube video that I think nicely shows what we have been trying to put up with for the last 6 months.

This clip is just over a minute long:

I, nor my parents, can take this any longer. I fail to see the point in paying £41 of my hard-earned money for something that only causes frustration, disappointment and raised blood pressure. Help!

Amazing. They can’t even take a complaint without generating an error.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Life, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.