the further adventures of a man's quest to obtain broadband

of course, i should be grateful that i live in a time and place where i am able to get broadband. but because i do, and i pay money for such services, i do expect a reasonable connection service. this, in my experience, is not something ntl are able to provide. see this recent post to discover the problems they have already presented.
i had tried to arrange a connection in good time so that i could be back on line during the first week in leeds; this would be fairly important as i would need to contact banks/utilities etc, as well as keep in contact with my friends. the engineer called tuesday night to confirm the following mornings appointment (good service), and arrived at 8.45am (good service). he was done fitting cable tv, phone and cable modem within 30 minutes, and explained that we would not be able to register until the following evening, due to some upgrade work at their end. fine. of course, things had to fall apart sometime - on trying to register internet services on thursday night, i was unable to get a connection, so i called ntl's 'customer service' number (freephone, luckily) and after 90 minutes, i had managed to manually register. however, i could still not get online. the boy i was talking to transferred me to tech support, who advise i had been registered incorrectly and would have to call back saturday if i still had no connection.
which i did. saturday morning 10am: 'right, we have a senior technician on the case, you should be up in 2 hours'. saturday afternoon 1.30pm: 'call back after 4pm'. saturday 4.30pm: 'right, we have a senior technician on the case, you should be up in 2 hours' all call lasted between 30 and 90 minutes, and not once did anyone properly apologise, explain what the exact problem was, or give an accurate time in which i could expect to receive a service that i was now paying for. this morning i called again, asked for someone to call me back with some answers, only to be told there was no phone with outside dialing capabilities. what? 'i don't believe you', i angrily exclaimed, but it turned out to be true, as i was in fact talking to someone in india. tonight, i got through to mervin, who within 10 minutes had things fixed up and working - although he did note that the person who registered the service on thursday night had set up a bandwidth of 300mb; i requested 750mb.
so i guess they will be receiving a letter from me - and my job working in the complaints department of a big insurance company may come in useful yet again.