Step into my office...

Boo thinks she's Alan Sugar!

Today was a day of paperwork, paperwork, tearing my hair out, and more paperwork. I got mountains of stuff done and now have a much shorter 'to do' list but I also have much higher blood pressure!

I've been having problems with my email ever since Virgin started mucking about with their POP3 accounts, and after many failed attempts to fix it myself I gave in and called their helpdesk.

I was in a queue listening to Christina Aguilera for 20 minutes before I got an answer. The guy said he needed to check something, put me on hold and told me not to go anywhere. 45 minutes later I got dumped back into the queue again and more Christina Aguilera. Rage begins to build.

Then I got a girl who was trying to help but blatantly couldn't understand my Scottish accent any better than I could understand her Indian accent. That's not a racist criticism, it's a pragmatic observation. She couldn't fix the problem so told me she was transferring me to 2nd level tech support.

Christina Aguilera sings on. Rage is now simmering.

Then I got a man in 2nd level support who told me the following:

Him: "I can take a look at this for you, but 2nd level support is a subscription based service so I'd need to take payment."

Me: "What? Are you telling me you're charging me to fix the email service Virgin broke themselves?"

Him: "Yes - our 1st level support is free but 2nd level is charged."

Me: "Why should your customers have to pay for the fact that your IT support don't know how to fix an IT problem? I'm not paying that."

Him: "I don't know what you expect me to do then. I can put you back through to 1st line if you want but they don't know how to fix it."

At this point Andy grabbed the phone off me and proceeded to utter a series of four letter words until the guy hung up. Which didn't really help things much.

Half an hour later, with Christina Aguilera's lungs starting to give out, we finally got the problem fixed.

Rage does not even begin to cover it!