All You Need is Sky?

An engineer from Sky called the other day to fix a signal problem. Things got off to a slightly worrying start:

“Have you got a stepladder?” he asked. “Mine’s in the van.”

He said it as if the van was in Botswana rather than parked right outside, but I obliged and he used the steps to replace my old dish, which he then presented to me. I looked at it, and then at him.

“What do you want me to do with that?” I asked him suspiciously.

“Well I can’t take it,” he said, so defensively you would think I’d asked him to eat it rather than remove it, “because if I took every dish I replaced the van would be full wouldn’t it?”

Resisting the temptation to suggest that there would be more room if he removed his stepladders occasionally I asked him what he would suggest I do with a faulty, rusty Sky dish.

“Well you’ll have to take it to the tip, won’t you? I can’t go because Sky won’t pay for the disposal permits.”

Actions vs. Words

I’d paid £65 for this service (and I use the word ‘service’ quite wrongly). I provided the steps, disposed of the dish and ultimately spent longer on the job than he did.

Sky’s words on the service we should expect from their engineers are telling. There aren’t any. The Sky website tells you all you need to know about HD and multiroom but try and find something on what we might expect when a Sky engineer comes to call and all goes deathly quiet.

The language we use and the way we use it is hugely complex. Sometimes what we don’t say can carry as much weight as what we do.

Sky doesn’t say anything about what you can expect from their service call experience. And that, it would seem, just about says it all.

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