I am a customer of Ntl television that is carried over a digital arial. Saturday and yesterday saw the arrival of an Atlantic Storm that was as fierce as anything that I have witnessed in my life. At 11 am yesterday I decided to reboot my desktop box as the weather was bad and the picture broken. After a few minutes a notice appeared on the TV explaining that the box was retrieving my information and this should take a few minutes and TV services will be restored. 24 hours later the same message is appearing on both TVs. So what do you do? you call customer care and see if they can help. I called yesterday 18 times and got no response. I have been calling since 9am this morning and I must say that as much as I love Vivaldi I am growing to associate "The Four Seasons" with unprofessional call centres and companies that will take your money but find that assisting its customers a step to far.

Every 30 seconds or thereabouts a voice comes over saying "we appreciate that you are holding for a customer care agent. Please bear with us a little longer , we apologise for this delay", a little longer 24 hours and I still have'nt spoken to a homo sapien.They say that they apologise for the delay but deep down they could'nt give a s##t about you or anyone else. We are left frustrated and angry , I am so angry now I would bite a dog but you must surpress your anger as if you start shouting down the telephone they will simply hang up saying that you were harressing them. Never mind that your blood pressure is dangerously high and you cant get through thats life in the new world.

There must be something seriously wrong with us as consumers if we accept this but the more I think about it there is little we can do except wait in line for somebody to answer you.

Well I'll sign off now and if this has a happy ending I'll update, a happy ending getting what you pay for.

When I was growing up we had a number of techniques to improve the reception on the one channel we had, RTE.

The first method was to slap the top of the TV. This would usually stop the rolling. However, as your fault seems to be with your "digital arial" rather than the TV itself the second method we used might give you more success.

This time we had to go out in the rain and the dark and shake the arial, or turn it a few degrees towards Dublin and see if you could hear anyone still inside holler that it was "ok now". The Riordans were back on.

Incidentally, we also had a boiler which would periodically stop. The solution, go out into the dark and the rain, into the boiler room and press a little red button on the side until it restarted, usually after about twenty minutes; but I digress....

Have you tried putting a ladder up against your wall, climbing up and shaking your dish or aligning it a few more degrees to Dublin? If that doesn't work you could try slapping your set top box, just in case.

Fantastic, I also suffer from being a customer of NTL. Logged a call for an extra line to be put into my house on the 15th of December, there was a storm in Oranmore Galway which caused a loss in picture quality, I tried 17 times to contact NTL and eventually I got through. The girl there didnt have a clue, and booked a repair for 18th of December. Now because I had a problem with a white screen showing up for 24 hours, I no longer have my appointment for the 15th, it has vanished and now I have to wait until the 18th to get a repair and no talk of the extra line now. In summary the repair has superseeded the extra line?

Now thats really annoying shit, if ever i heard it!!!