Saturday 27 May 2006

Optus, thy Helpdesk is crap

Our tiny office at home has two PC's - one for me and one for Her Ladyship. Mine is on BigPond ADSL, and hers is on Optus dialup.

We finally bit the bullet last week and decided to wire up a home network and put both on my ADSL.

The actual connecting of the PC's etc was a doddle. I have a firewall/router now with 4 switch ports in the back, so that made it a breeze. No fiddling around with network bridge settings and the like on the PC.

Things were going well until Her Ladyship tried to send an email from Outlook. No dice - wouldn't go. Email was coming in, but nothing was going out. She fiddled with various Outlook settings, but nothing helped.

So she rang Optus to ask them to help (I was at work and could offer not assistance). When I got home, I got an earful about how stupid and useless and braindead the Optus helpdesk staff are. I didn't bother calling them - instead, I got onto their website and looked in the support area. There were some documents telling you how to configure Outlook, but none of the settings worked.

I spent about half an hour dicking around on the Optus site, then went over to net-registry, which hosts the domain name for her business. They were no help either.

Thankfully, I have a bookmark to Ozcableguy on myPC. About 2 minutes of browsing through his FAQ's solved the problem. All that I had to do was change the outgoing SMTP server from optus to bigpond, and we could send email.

Fuck, what a waste of a day. I presume that the BigPond site will offer no help either if you want to setup your BigPond email account on a PC connected to Optus cable. Pricks. Turds. Wankers. Why can't they be civil and provide a bit of advice in this area?

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