The Irony of Digital

Over the last month I have had an unfortunate hiatus in posting to this blog as technology has conspired against me, so hopefully I will be forgiven if I spend a little time on a little diatribe before resuming.

Firstly the keyboard and trackpad on my 2 month old MacBook Pro broke. This happened straight after my last post and a week before two interviews for lectureships. So I had to firstly use a USB mouse and keyboard to complete the work on the presentations I needed to give before putting the MBP into my local AppleCentre for repair under warranty.

Around the same time as my last post I discovered I could not upload to my web server hosted by 123-reg.co.uk. After the post I discovered it was worse than that as my website was also down. It is to the credit of 123-reg that they quickly got to work in sorting out the problem and before I could say four weeks they eventually reset my FTP account. Of course practically four weeks had gone by before this happened and I had already transferred my website to Lycos, but only after I had left progressively angrier posts on their support forum.

So you can see it hasn't been a good month for me in regard to technology which is ironic as the lectureships I was interviewed for were for a Senior Lectureship in New Media and Digital Media respectively.

It is impossible to guage if my September digital problems had any bearing on my lack of success but at least I found ways around the technical problems in the interim.

On a final note I would like to leave you all with two notes of caution.

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Firstly…
Anyone thinking of buying hosting from 123-reg please do not base your decision on my experience alone but do read the following before the before you buy.

Customer (…) 09/09/2007 22:44

My website at www.bazaar.me.uk is not (a) allowing me to upload any new content via FTP and (b) is not displaying any of the content(in this case CSS formated code and a swf file).

I did report this last week but this email form doesn't appear to have worked.

My website is down as we speak and I cannot afford this downtime.


Customer (…) 11/09/2007 14:19

It has been over 24 hours since I last posted my problem and I have had no response from 123. My subscription is up in Novemeber. If I don't get my problem sorted out ASAP and my website back up and running I will move my account to a different hosting company. Please respond immediately.

Customer (…) 13/09/2007 09:54

This absolutely fucking ridiculous! Support my arse! My website has been down for god knows how long, I cannot FTP and 123 does not make it easy to get any help. If any one does read this then its too late I wont be renewing my hosting. 123 has now lost a long standing customer.

Response (…) 22/09/2007 17:24

Dear (…)

With regards to your email on 13th September 2007.

123-reg would like to apologise for the delay in responding to your support query, this has been caused by an unprecedented amount of contacts to our support team.

We have reset the password for yout FPp which now logs in successfully. The new password has been emailed to the email address in your 123-reg account.

Regards,

(…)
123-REG Support


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Secondly…
My MBP took just over 2 weeks to be repaired AND the full 3 weeks to be returned to me, and even then I had to ring the AppleCentre to ask if it was fixed after Apple sent me a questionnaire to guage how well the repair had been handled. The MBP had been sitting in AppleCentre Liverpool for 7 DAYS and no-one had rang me. Now I have experience of the maxim "great product, shit customer service". I still continue to endorse the Apple product over the Windows/PC platform anyday but just wish Apple would finally get their act together.

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That's the end of the diatribe, I promise.