Technology and the Countryside
After a prolonged absence from blogging due to time pressure
I have decided to start again. This is prompted particularly by a series of
technology frustrations that began with a brave idea to upgrade my mobile
phone.
It’s a long and boring story but in the saga of lost data, a
lost password, a dud iPhone and a blame-shifting game between o2, Apple,
Eclipse internet and our IT support company which continued until the phone was
replaced I realised that the real frustration was not being able to speak to
anyone to help sort the problem unless you can go into real live premises. With
Eclipse I had to type my questions in a form of telephone tennis and wait for
an answer so that something that could have taken 5 minutes took an hour. If
you live in ‘deep country’ getting to live premises isn’t easy (if they will let you in at all) although I have
to say that the Apple store in Exeter have been excellent.
Life has become more complicated since the recent storms
brought down a beech tree and, with it, the telephone line which of course
carries the internet connection. We run a holiday business as well as the farm
at home and, gloriously peaceful as the radio silence is, I can’t help but
think that we are losing business. We only just got the tax and VAT sorted out
in time (sadly!) There must be others in the same boat. My replacement phone
cannot be backed up now because we have no connection. Thus my last lifeline
has been severed and the saga continues!
Of course you can’t
speak to anyone who can really help at BT.I am planning a gentle ambush of a telephone engineer to get his mobile number which I will auction for charity. You can get in a queue to speak to
someone in Mumbai but then you get general answers not specific to your
locality. I would just like to know when they are going to mend the line.
Apparently someone has been out to look at it and has decided that a survey is
needed. What rubbish! The tree broke the line. It needs to be mended. We could
have told them that.
A privatised BT beholden to its shareholders may have saved
the public purse lots of money and made its investors wealthier but there needs
to be a balance. An effective monopoly providing basic infrastructure to rural
businesses needs to provide a better and more accessible service and send its
employees on the sort of customer service courses that tourism businesses use.
It is the ‘old fashioned’ concept of personal communication using the spoken
word that has been lost. Technology encourages this. On-line bookings dealt
with remotely, reliance on texts, emails and social media, the lack of phone
numbers displayed on websites- too much is for the convenience of the provider
rather than the customer.
Better
broadband speeds will be welcome in the countryside but not if it means that
essential service providers forget that their customers can feel very cut off
and their businesses vulnerable if there is no-one to talk to!
