So much for Virgin superfast broadband! I've clocked mine at 192Kb. Superfast my arse!

Virgin Media. No broadband. No TV. The engineer was booked for between 8am and noon on Saturday. If I missed the slot Virgin were going to charge me a £10 penalty. For a bank holiday there were other things I would rather be doing but the frustration of being without, erm... really not good.

At 9:30am the phone rings. It's customer service, the engineer has called in sick. No one else is available. This is taking the piss. Called in sick on a bank holiday? Guess what he's been up to. I have no choice but to reschedule.

Given Virgin Media were going to charge me a tenner, shouldn't I be entitled to do the same as they missed their slot? Maybe this would provide an incentive for the company to start providing a proper level of customer service. What a prick of an engineer. What do you think I should do?

Rather than taking responsibility for a botched up negotiation, Virgin Media, who sucked up Telewest and NTL, are broadcasting a message on Sky One in which they blame Sky for the channel being unavailable. "Thanks to Sky", they say, "the Sky One channel is no longer available. They've picked up their ball and gone home.  Foul play? We think so." 

The viewer is then invited to visit their website, virginmedia.com/fairplay, in which they ask a clearly biased question "What do you think of Sky withdrawing its non-premium channels like Sky One, Sky News and Sky Sports News from Virgin Media's TV service?".

Here's another question. Isn't it about time that Virgin stopped acting like a teenager and grew up?  I can hardly believe reading a comment on one message board where someone says "well done for standing up to the big guys". 

Are you serious? The Virgin Group employs over 35,000 people in 200 companies worldwide and has a turnover in excess of over £4billion. They're hardly the little guy or the underdog they like to portray themselves as - if you think otherwise you've been seduced by the Marketeers. This is big business.

Virgin claims to put consumers first, well, what about all the viewers who are now paying the same price for a reduced service? I would say this is really annoying shit dot com.

You've got to pick a pocket or two