I am known to be a hard-driving consumer. Hey, I work hard for my money, they should do the same for mine. It is all fair and good.

Recently, my phone line was bad (read: Noisy) and that affected my ADSL line as well (read: intermittent Internet Connectivity). When I called the service provider, they told me that the linesman would only come to my place after 3 days and, as usual, said: They will be there between 1300 to 1800 hours

I was stunned. Where is the basic SLA ? They said that because of the rain these days, the Fault Lines Technicians and Engineers were swarmed and therefore were busy. I told them - to be honest - thats your problem; not mine. I cannot tell my boss or my clients that I can only answer emails or fight fires 3 days later because there was too much rain and a Global Billion-Dollar company like Singtel cannot handle it. They cannot compensate me for a quantifying amount for loss of service for 3 days because there is loss of business activities to me. Try to quantify that !!!

Hey, SingTel - Learn ! Learn ! Learn ! If there is excessive rain and fault rates (read: Demands) are high. For goodness sake - Increase the size of your field team. Pay them per-incidence. Train more people. You have a basic service level to keep up. I will understand if your Comcenter gets terrorized or hi-jacked but Rain ? C'mon - That is hardly an excuse. As a global company that has revenues in billions - you ought to do better. Shame.

And whats the deal with between 1300 - 1800 hours. I never did understand that. Why penalize a comsumer who has to take leave (hey, someone has to work hard to pay the service provider, dont they ?) to wait 5 hours for a technician who comes in and solves the problem within 10 minutes.

I think this is becoming to be a Singaporean culture - started by the Government, of course. I still laugh when I hear our own economist forecasting: "...we expect our GDP to grow to between 1% to 4%".

Dudes, that is a huge gap just to cover your as*es. If you are wrong, admit you are wrong. Dont give yourself that gap just so you can always be right.

Try submitting that report to hard drivers in the US or Europe and see them cringed. Giving that GDP gap as actual reported numbers is insane. Dont they know that a 1% gap equates to billions of dollars. It is akin to saying that my company may rake in between 10 dollars and 1,000,000 dollars this year and get some angel investors to sink their see funds in it.

Angel Investor: "Hey, I think I made a good investment today"
His Wife: "Oh ? Which lucky company is that ?"
Angel Investor: "Well, they stand to make 1,000,000 dollars because of their great product and wonderful management"
His Wife: "Excellent ! Maybe its time to have that 3rd kid we have always wanted"
Angel Investor: "Well, honey...not so soon ... because they can make just only 10 dollars too..."
[His Wife puts on her clothes again ...]

...Thats why I think the weatherman in Singapore has the easiest job. Our weather is fairly constant all year around and I hope one day we dont hear our weatherperson saying something like: "...expect temperatures to be between 1 and 35 degree Celsius..." Of course, they are always right and never wrong.

With all the noise I made and a threat to write to the press about it, the linesman came in 2 hours time on the very same day.

Remind me not to go into any consumer business next time.