Dear BT

Dear BT,

I've had an issue with my phone line for the best part of a week now, and have been unable to make or receive any phone calls. This issue has also caused my broadband - Thankfully not with your incompetent business - to lose connectivity on a regular basis (Every few minutes). To add insult to this already salted injury, BT customer service representatives refused to acknowledge that there was anything at all wrong with the BT equipment, and instead had me repeating the same damnable (Not to mention completely useless in this, and no doubt other, cases) "tests". After three telephone conversations (Although, I would barely call the primitive noises offered by the "Customer Services" worthy of the word "conversation") and one fault logging through the infuriating website, I finally get to a stage where there exists the possibility that I can get someone who knows their arse from their elbow to come to my property and investigate the fault. I book, gleefully, the next available appointment and relax, assuming that the problem would soon be resolved. Fast forward eighteen hours, and the engineer appointment has come and gone - With no hint of anything changing. I wish I could say my lack of surprise allayed my outrage that, once again, British Telecom had stiffed me, and cost a family member money to wait in for the non existent engineer (Are there only three in the world? Because the number of faults that I have reported on behalf of customers and myself that go unseen to by one of the fabled BT Engineers is.. Well, it's astronomical.). So now, as I write this, someone is doing something with the line as it goes from usable (IE: I get a dialtone) to unusable (IE: I get no dial tone) with no interaction on my part beyond lifting the receiver. I have had the misfortune of rebooking an appointment for the elusive engineers - Who I hope will deem my issue worthy of their presence (Although, I know that in reality it's BT's shoddy booking system that prevents their arrival to the site of a problem) and resolve it.

In case this long winded tale of woe and frustration hasn't made it perfectly clear:

BT, your employees are usually inept (And this is not meant to sound racist, but could you please employ some people capable of speaking English without reading from a cue-card to man the phones? It'd make the arduous task of reporting the numerous faults on your network just a little easier), your systems are atrocious at best, and your customer support leaves so much to be desired, I often find myself willing British Telecom into non existence, while simultaneously trying to launch your utter ineptitude into the nearest dying star.

Please, please, even if you take nothing else from this complaint, make your fault reporting system less infuriating, and employ some more engineers.

Yours sincerely,

Terry

IT Support, and User Data

Have you ever wondered how much you expose when you send your pc, laptop, phone etcetera back for repair?

Working in the IT support field, I see a lot of devices come back with a lot of data, and one can only assume that it’s at least partially personal, knowing that most people use their work machine as their personal machine.

An example landed on my desk today. It’s not a work machine, but it is a machine we’re looking at on behalf of a customer (Who’s laptop, incidentally, has exactly the same issue) – It’s the customers offspring.

I know that there’s nothing that could be done by the user – explorer.exe failed immediately on logon – To tone down the amount of personal things displayed, but it did highlight something quite important. The user had set up a slideshow of pictures to cycle every thirty seconds. Without even looking at where the folder was, whether it was titled, or even if the images were titled, a fair amount of information could be lifted.

That was without doing any digging. Knowing how things operate, and where to look, you could build one hell of a profile of the user, without ever speaking to them. Fortunately for the users that I deal with, I have no interest in anything they say, do, or think – To top that off, we have a stringent series of policies in place to avoid violating any users privacy in place.

It’s unreasonable, of course, to suggest that users – Business or otherwise – should hide their private data on their own machines – Much less to suggest they should clean up in preparation for getting a virus, or having another issue, that causes it to need to go to whoever they use for IT support.

It does, however, highlight an interesting issue. How does a company guarantee that they’re respecting privacy and the Data Protection acts when it comes to IT support?

Where I work, we have a strict policy of contacting the user of the machine to get permission for certain things, even to go so far as to require customer permission to perform thorough scans of their personal files. It seems absurd, but given some of the things that I have seen crop up during these searches, it is the only way for us to be certain that the user knows we’ve had to go there, and that they have given us permission to do so.

Making backups of user files is also incredibly infuriating, what should only take as long as it takes to dump onto a USB hard drive can take up to days extra, just trying to track down the customer simply to get a “Yes”. It’s worse when the customer doesn’t really understand what you’re asking them – Which is more common than you’d think – An hour to explain the process, the reason, and how we ensure that their data is secured from prying eyes. We do get some absurd requests from the slightly more IT savvy users, which add extra complications.

It is, though, understandable to a degree. I wouldn’t want someone poking through my collections of data, beyond what I post onto the internet. Not that I even have that much private stuff, or any for that matter, but the simple knowledge that someone has been digging through it does not inspire comfort.

Fortunately, being twenty three and male, no one is interested enough to go digging through my personal documents – Which is quite comforting.

What about, though, a woman taking her laptop to one of the more common “IT Repair Shop” style businesses that have been steadily cropping up over the years. It’s been seen on British TV more than once, how some stores will go through everything, and in some of the more sophisticated setups, get recorded doing so.

What’re the options, then?

I, personally, don’t use anything on my desktop. Being my own IT support helps.

My laptop though, being a portable device, runs a bit of software known as “Truecrypt”. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it does at least offer a level of difficulty for the average browser to decipher, most of which probably wouldn’t be interested in doing – As I said earlier, I’m not interesting enough for that to be the case.

So, then, what’s my point?

Take care of your data. Be prepared to have a stranger nose through it at any point in time, don’t take chances. Especially not with laptops.