BT – Here We Go Again, and Proper English Dogs

Holly finally reached someone at British Telecom who did not lose the connection with her, did not promise to call back and then fail to do so, did not say only that they were looking into the problem with our connection. No, this woman gathered all of Holly's information, opened the appropriate records in the computer and told Holly, “I don't see an action order for this account.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Holly, “that of all the people I have called and spoken to, none of them actually made a record that we had a problem with our line?”

“I must be honest with you. That is entirely possible.”

So one full week after our phone was supposed to be turned on, we finally found a competent person at BT who could make a record of our technical problem and order that it be fixed. The next day, a technician came and repaired our line. We have a working phone.

All's well that ends well. If only that were the end of it.

You may recall the woman at BT to whom Holly spoke earlier who said, “We're bad, but we're not that bad”? The issue in question would be whether we would be billed for phone service that we had not actually received. Holly called BT to confirm that their billing would reflect service that had started on the 19th.

“But our records,” said the woman in billing, “say that service started on the 11th.”

“No,” Holly said. “That's when service was supposed to start.”

“You can negotiate with the billing department for a service-fault adjustment.”

“No. Service did not start until the 19th. I will not pay a bill for service that I did not receive.”

“Hold on.” When the woman returned, she said, “You didn't call to report a problem until the 18th.”

“It is true that I did call on the 18th. I also called on the 12th, on the 14th, and twice on the 15th. On the 18th, I happened to reach someone competent for the first time.”

At last the BT representative relented and, without us having to negotiate some “compromise” settlement, our billing will begin on the 19th, when we heard a dial tone for the first time.

As Holly was having this conversation, she was remembering the meter reader for British Gas who had come to read our neighbors' meters. Holly asked him about using our new pay-as-you-go token card to add money to our meter. He advised her to let the meter run down to zero and only then use the new card. And what about British Gas's promise to refund the money that was already on the meter? He laughed that off. “No, no," he warned. "Don't let them be pushing you!”

So Holly wasn't about to be pushed into an “adjustment” from BT, either.

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Having the phone is progress, but it seems we are still far from having our Internet connection. I have found two different benches that are suitable for work, each within the range of a different unencrypted WiFi connection. One of these is in a dog park. Well, it would be a dog park in the U.S. Here, it's just a park that happens to be suitable for dogs, a park with a big grassy expanse.

The result is that I am seeing a lot of the neighborhood dogs and their owners, and what I am seeing amazes me. Every dog is trained. When the dogs come into the park, their owners generally put them through their paces of obeying hand signals to go out, lie down, come back, stand left, go around, sit, stand right, and so forth. Only after this reminder of who is in charge are the dogs given leave to run off on their own.

As I say, I have been sitting at a bench. If I were on a bench in the western or rural U.S., I would expect most of the dogs that were taking their free roam to sniff at my legs. Dogs, in my experience, don't respect my personal space. Their owners do, but the owners' expression of this respect is to apologize for their dogs, or to scold the dogs as if the dogs could understand what they were saying. “Now leave that man alone!”

In hours and hours of sitting at this London bench, I have had dozens of dogs pass within a few feet of me. A few males have paused to mark the far end of the bench. But not one has sniffed my trouser leg or shoe. Not one had paid me the least bit of attention.

Above, I limited my assessment of dog behavior to the western U.S. because what I am observing may be partly a matter of urban culture. People in cities have to manage their dogs well, if for no other reason than that a disobedient dog may not survive living among busy streets. I don't recall New York dogs greeting or sniffing human strangers, though I also don't remember having seen New York dogs unleashed.

But in much of the U.S., dog owners are the permissive friends of their pets, not their masters, not the alpha dog. What I'm seeing in the dog park here suggests that at least among the people who choose to exercise their pets in the park, everyone has done obedience training, which is as much about educating the owner for a lifetime of dog ownership as it is about training that one dog.

Perhaps the archetype of the American dog owner is a psychology professor I know. He is a man of a deservedly brilliant reputation in his field. Naturally, he knows all about motivation and the operant shaping of behavior. But when his dog was trying to eat off the table, how did he intervene?

“Oh, Prince,” he said, “I wish you wouldn't do that.”