Creepy Foxtel Complaint Resolution

Our Foxtel IQ has had a malfunctioning live pause for some time now.  You hit pause and the pause sign comes on the screen while your TV show goes right on playing in the background.  Annoyingly you then can’t change channels or do anything until you “exit” live pause.  Which is not really paused.

Television is hardly the cornerstone of my life.  As for live pause – myeh.  I tend to record my favourite shows and then watch whenever I have free time (mainly so I can fast forward through the ads).  But for a five-year-old who has been told to go and do something right now* live pause is vital.  Today I got sick of the whining and decided to ring Foxtel for help fixing the dead pause situation**.

Annoyingly I got one of those voice recognition answering thingies that never works.  Call Telstra and ask for “faults” and you get a recorded message saying, “Telstra records indicate that we currently don’t have any faults”*** and then it thanks you for calling and hangs up on you****.  That’s if it doesn’t accidentally register your request as “I wish to speak Falusian” and switches into an unintelligible long-forgotten language.  I digress.

“Please tell me why you’re calling,” a suave male voice said and I sigh.  What the heck, give it both barrels.

“Foxtel IQ live pause isn’t working,” I huff, waiting for the “I’m sorry I didn't understand your request.  Please wait while I transfer you to one of our customer service representatives.”

But today it's not to be.

“Ah,” Suave says, “A service call.  I just need to verify some information.  Please say the ten digit phone number connected to your account, including area code.”

“Uh…XXXXX XXXXX,” I say quickly.

“XXXXX XXXXX, is that correct?”

Smug bugger.

“Um.  Yes?”

“Excellent.  We find that 90% of service issues are resolved by shutting down and restarting your account from our end.  Let’s try that now.”
Behind me the television suddenly goes silent and I swing around to stare at it.

“You’ll notice all the lights of your IQ will come on all at once…”

Which they do, on cue.

“…and then they will go off again.”

And bugger me they do.

“Please wait five minutes for your service to resume.  If you have a Foxtel IQ, your service will resume exactly where it ended.  If your service does not resume, please call us back.  We’ve taken a note of your phone number and, if you call back within the next forty-eight hours, you will be put through to our service centre.  Thanks for calling Foxtel.”

I sit there, goosebumps crawling all over as I realise that I didn’t ever actually speak to a person and the Foxtel computer helpfully rebooted everything without even asking me if that was okay.  I am in the process of relating this to my small family (who want to know why Sonic the Hedgehog or, indeed, the television as a whole isn’t on) when Foxtel suddenly powers back up…right back on the kids channel it was on when it shut down.  Worse/better, live pause now works.

Creepy.

* Because you ignored the first thirteen requests.
**We’ve tried a bunch of stuff but nothing has worked so far.
***Of course you don't.  Just ask your customers.  And your shareholders.  And the other telcos.  *ahem*

**** This is not actually what I got when I called them but the format and end result on my blood pressure was similar.  Fortunately, we're not with them anymore.