Virgin Media's tech support

I moaned about Virgin Media's tech support last year but when my connection was on a go-slow last week I discovered that you now have to pay 25p per minute to talk to tech support. Fantastic, I thought, a payed-for service will mean that it's worth having and I'll get to talk to a proper network engineer and not some person who is flipping over laminated pages. How wrong can you be?! The first thing the chap insisted was that it must be my router at fault - I told him that I'd swapped out the router with no change in performance - typically 40kBits per sec. He then told me to directly attach my PC to the cable-modem - never a good idea to come out from behind a NAT router, but we'll let that one go.

Anyhow - I told him that I'd already tried both a Mac and a Linux machine but there was no change;

Sir, we do not support Mac OS or Linux

So, you don't support the one OS that your entire network runs on?!

Sir, you must open Internet Explorer and delete all your cookies

And this is going to improve my connection speed how? How long before you advice my to re-install Windows?

Sir, that is step number five, now we must do things in order

I then told him that my neighbour (who also had Virgin) was suffering a slow connection;

Sir, my system is telling me that you have a perfect connection

It seems that Virgin's tech support have neither the tools to diagnose nor the expertise to fault-find any problems and the fact that everything he suggested was entirely without any merit leads me to believe they are just trying to keep you on the line as long as possible without any hope of resolving the issue.

And this you pay for!