I work in a call centre for British Telecom, in the Faults department, half the time taking calls from ingrates who don't DESERVE a telephone connection!

Actually people were really understanding and patient today, and accepted what I had to tell them, even though the engineers can't do their job properly and the engineer's notes portal wasn't working AS USUAL, making the callback work, which I had been assigned to, twenty times more difficult.

Some days, no matter what you do, people aren't as understanding, and you can't seem to say anything right. I had a day like that last Saturday, and I left that day wanting to get a new job.

Also, my job is way too target orientated, and we are expected to have a daily call handling time of so many seconds (I think the target now is 385 seconds), and we have to do so many callbacks in an hour if you're offline. I think it's out of order, especially as a lot of customers are leaving because of the poor level of customer service. We should spend more time with the customer rather than sticking to some unrealistic targets that make the company look better than it is. A colleague of mine said that whilst BT were the pioneers of broadband at least in this country, they are only the third most popular broadband provider, after Sky and Virgin. (The technical support is absolutely AWFUL! Which is why I refuse to have BT Broadband in this house. I only really have the phone line as I need it for Tiscali internet and Sky TV.)

Still, I work with a lovely bunch of people, and we help each other through. We even go out for the occasional night out together. Just last week I took a half day on my late days so I could go for a meal out with some of them. It was a good night.