DavidBrook

Woudn't worry about deportation, its a "civil matter", not a crime. But according the law, they could keep your car until you pay them. But once you on the road with yout car, they can do nothing about and for 30'k noone apply to the court. Police can't do anything.

Thanks for this, my lawyer said much the same thing, and I appreciate your comment.

Its a real pity. It just doesn't have to be like this.

D

I foolishly used my real name as a user name and have received some unfortunate emails.

I would like a new user name but I am not allowed to create another one and allow this one to lapse. Apparently.

What is the best way to achieve a change of user name?

D

One of my friends had a BM 525i in repair there, 10 years ago. Overheating problems, ! Overhaul the engine cost about 200'k, they estimated . He tought it's expensive, came and asked me to go with him and check it. So we went to BKK.. After arriving we saw the engine is not in the car anymore and not even near the car. They said the pistons are not good anymore. Usually could be not to seroius like that, because my friend only had overheating problems, but still can drive the car before visiting them. Anyway i didn't belefe and asked them to show me the pistons. So one of the mecanics was on the way in another room to get the piston's. Same time i told my friend that they gonna show us 4 pistons. My friend didn't understand exactly why i told him that and what i mean. The mecanic came back with 4 old bad pistons. I asket him: Is that all 4? He sayd: yes, and confirmed me that they had to overhaul the engine. I said to my friend: I tought you had a 525 6 cylinder engine, a 6 cylinder with 4 pistons, thet's someting new! My friend waked up now.

Anyway we couldn't do much, as my friend didn't aks me in the beginning, so he tolt them to fix all and put the engine together. After 2 weeks he received the car, payd their money, for repairs. Car runs same before, but still overheating. I checked the car, Problem was a the oil clutch of the enginefan.

I should have seen the writing on the wall 2 years ago (I bought the car from them and actually got quite a good deal - for Thailand - since it was the last of that model).

I went to their Surawong depot with a the orange 'engine problem' warning light coming on intermittently. They put their head mechanic on it (30 years experience). After having the car for 2 days of testing, he had no clue. Obviously hadnt read the manual. When I went to pick it up he still had no clue but went with me while we drove around the block to see if it still came on. it did. The best he could suggest is that it was because I used my left foot to press the brake pedal (in other words I drove it with 2 feet). When I asked why he thought this, he said because he knew someone in Chiang Mai who had the same problem and he used his left foot to hit the brake.

I took it to another mechanic - the fuel pump was faulty. I kid you not.

Plus, I now find several small scratches on the bodywork which were not there when it went to them, and about 150km has mysteriously appeared on the clock, the second time this has happened. Call me a slow learner but I think I now have a pretty good picture of Yontrakit and how it conducts its business.

I have told them that I am no longer their customer, and the 30,000THB I owe them for the service will not be paid. They threatened to call the police and have me deported. Just not the way to go...

D

btw, I am the original poster, I wanted a user name which is not my real name but apparently I am not allowed to have 2 logins, nor to get a new one and delete the old one. Dems da roolz - apparently.

A message for David Brook from his recent post: 'Thai's DO complain' just as my neighbour did last week and yes he was quite angry with the Maxnet engineers ...a bit of 'jai roon' ness. Also David, your observations may have some base at to what Thai's are about, but please don't paint broad brushstrokes about what Thai culture is or not (your paras 3 and 4). I believe this is in the 'forum rules' TY.

Cheers for the feedback, though as I was quoting more or less verbatim from a published work (by a Thai psych) about Thai psychology... I doubt I will qualify for a righteous rucking for quoting what Thais say about Thais - even on Thai Visa which has its own commercial interests to look after.

You are right though, some Thais do complain but they are in a minority. By the way, we all generalise when we speak, we all *have to* generalise when we speak, it is what keeps communication working. Broad brush strokes are a part of life and one swallow doth not a summer make. This I happen to know about.

I do wish they would learn how to manage better though, even if that is another broad brush stroke. Life in Thailand is great in general (oops, another one!), but the prevailing competence level is a prevailing problem (and another one!).

Otherwise we wouldn't see so many complaints about it I suppose.

Let us know how you get on, I would be interested to see if jai yen yen does anything better than a kick up the ass. I could probably so with learning a bit more on how to motivate people to do their job.

D

I have had True 2mb for 4 montha now, crap. I have two phone lines, I just had CSloxinfo installed lastweek on the second true line, works great! I have the 2mb connection. I'm outside Bangkok, Bankhae area.

What about 4mbits "Int" from BUddy / ADC .... ? any reviews? 1800THB + VAT

Buddy BB is the same as True and Maxnet. Used them once, never again. Inevitably it is because their is no management mechanism to deal with thing that do not go right.

Thai management do not understand management by exception, nor the 80/20 rule. Nor indeed the idea that customers who get pissed off leave and don't come back. Then they blame bad karma when they go bankrupt. Off to the wat for a bit of the old tamboon and everything will be peaches again.

A while back I had a small building project to complete upcountry. In the midst of a heated discussion about build quality with the major contractor, one of the older subbies took the contractor off for a bit of a chat, some of which I over-heard. He told him that farangs often just won't accept stuff that Thais accept. That we complain if we don't get what we pay for. And that if he pissed me off he would lose the job and I would never use him again, so he wouldnt get the next job, not at any price. Since it was a small village and I had more projects to do, he rightly believed that might be a problem.

The contractor appeared to be genuinely astonished, like he had never heard of such a thing. He didn't enjoy the loss of face very much but I did get what I needed.

*sigh* culture shock. Its a whole different world out here my friend.

D

CSlox is a bag of <deleted> during peak hours, the bandwidth is throttled down 80% from 8am -> 7pm.

That's because your likly using a cheap home package. Doesn't happen with biz package as mentioned earlier.

Indeed, however this is 5 times what I was paying in the UK 5 years ago, where what I paid then would now buy be 8Mb.

The price of incompetence, stupidity and arrogance can sometimes be very high for the customer. Not that any Thai will care much about that, especially if the customer is not a Thai.

Sad but true.

D

So now I have voice recordings and photos to take to there main office and will se what that does.

Save yourself the time and aggravation. Nobody will give the staff a rucking, no matter how richly deserved. Nobody gives a shit, and very very few Thai managers will risk upsetting the staff. The lunatics are absolutely in charge of the asylum.

What drives this is the numbers game. If you have 1000 customers and 100 are complainers, just ignore them or fob them off with some old <deleted> and keep advertising for another 100. Out of those 100, only 10 will be complainers, let them go and advertise for another 10 and so on. In general, Thais do not complain so there is no real incentive for these muppets to get better at the service thing.

The reality in Thailand is that Thai service sucks. It is all about getting the money. Once the money is in the pocket then delivery and service are pretty much optional. For this reason, you should never lend money to a Thai. They don't mean to be the way they are, they have just never been taught about responsibility and obligation outside of the family. As Napoleon said, try not to attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.

The other reality in Thailand is that they do not consider telling lies to be telling lies, they are just making the relationship 'smooth' (well, their side of the relationship anyway). Thais loathe aggravation; it generally means they have to think and do some work and they don't like to do that. Doing a good job simply is not on their radar.

Sorry my friend but the sooner you get used to this the sooner you can start building a strategy to minimise the aggravation and learn to love the things in Thailand that are not diminished by the legendary Thai incompetence.

Odd how it generally doesn't seem to be the same upcountry... at least, I have found the upcountry Thai to be a whole different and much more enjoyable thing.

D

Hypnotherapy is often useful a phobia is a learned behaviour and approaches which address the unconscious levels of the mind are generally more effective than the more cognitive approaches. If you drop me a line I will let you have a phone number for a chat about your g/f's case.

D

Thanks y'all.

D

I got asked this the other day and I dont know the answer, maybe someone out there does.

I have a friend who married his g/f in UK. The marriage was never registered in Thailand, and it broke down. Sh*t happens. Can wifey divorce him in Thailand?

The law in Thailand seems gloriously vague sometimes, ask 3 Thai lawyers and you get 4 opinions. Anyone out there know the answer?

D

had enough of TRUE 'high-speed' crap product and service. Thinking of trying CS Loxinfo, though the initial signs of competence in their sales office are very discouraging.

How is there home user service - anyone using them?

D

Now everyone knows its proving a bad year for tourism. 5 star hotel occupancy is currently between 15% to 30% in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Phuket around half normal levels for this time of year. I suspect the lower end of the market is doing a bit better. I dont know the exact numbers but I am sure they will show few tourists and tourists spending less money.

Now it is easy to blame this all on the global recession but there is more going on out there...

Compare this showing record numbers flocking to Bali....

http://indonesia.homesgofast.com/news/bali...s-now-up-I1376/

With this showing arrivals down 25% to Phuket...

http://www.travelfish.org/board/post/trave...met--grim-times

Why should Bali's visitors be at record levels and Phuket's collapsing. Is it simply the politics? Is it the slew of bad press over crime by here?

One hotel owner told me that travel agents 'simply dont market Thailand anymore' and that 'there were just so many alternatives.' Another said there was no sign of there being 'anybody here' for the foreseeable future.

So has Thailand had its 'day in the sunshine' as far as tourism is concerned or is it just a temporary decline due to politics and the economy?

Chickens coming home to roost I'm afraid. Thais have done it to themselves, it is 100% self-inflicted. For as long as they behave in the disgraceful way that they do, I will shed no tears.

D

I am with AIS and have only had one of these, which was abusive from the get-go. I reported it, AIS identified the number as one of theirs and dealt with it. No recurrences. I thought they dealt with it pretty well, all things considered, better than they would have done in the UK I suspect.

D

Sorry you are being persecuted. My internet service from True has been excellent for the past six years. My current speed of 8 mbs is great and I have had a total outage of probably less than 30 minutes in six years.

Sounds like the topology of the network where you are is different, good luck to you, I may come and live next door. I have heard here and elsewhere that the TRUE service is a bit of a postcode lottery, but you would think they might try to improve the areas which are shit rather than pretend they don't exist. Not the Thai way though.

Their 'engineers' have been to the condo where I live and say everything is OK, but to be frank, the old joke about how to tell when Thais are lying springs to mind.

Hey ho. I see a vision of my future. I see the letters TT&T ...

D

Well, there you go. For all those who don't understand why TRUE continue to offer such disastrous products and service, and don't seem interested in getting better, I just talked to their Technical Director. He said (and I quote):

"Well if the service is so bad, why are you here?". Excellent.

I was just gobsmacked. All I could do was tell him that just isn't the way to go unless you are seriously retarded, and hang up. He didn't trouble to ring back so he probably figured that's me told. With people of this calibre at the top I am sure TRUE shareholders are sleeping very nicely at night. All things became clear about the financial performance of TRUE Corp.

Road to Damascus.

By the way, I had someone overseas traceroute my IP address and you'll never guess... They found the same latency and bottleneck problem as I found while tracerouting the other way. Guess where it is? Riiiiight... in the TRUE network. I sample the throughput at 2 minute intervals and I haven't had faster performance than an EDGE modem could give me for several days. Torrents are like treacle flowing uphill, NNTP is unusable, and even web pages regularly take about the same time as in the 9600 modem days. Pitiful.

These people really are clowns, The problem is, they take themselves so very seriously and don't seem to know people are laughing at them.

D

Hi.

I don't know about Mac OSX however for torrents to work properly you need to specify a port in your torrent software (i guess you use Transmission?) and then "forward" that port in your router. If you keep your torrent software on the standard "randomize port" setting it won't work right.

Same goes for usenet clients, you must forward their respective port in the router.

Check www.portforward.com for instructions for your router model.

In case that has been done and it is still not working then you may have to either specifically allow said ports and/or said programs through any firewall that might be part of OSX.

True do not shape bandwidth, i am using them heavily and have no issues (using Ubuntu Linux and a router).

Best regards.....

Thanh

Cheers, did all that and changed routers so I tested on 2. The HuaWei MT880 router and the Zyxel P660. Port forwarding appears to have made a big difference to the upload speed oddly enough, but bugger all to the download speed. My newsgroup service did a traceroute and found big bottlenecks inside the TRUE network, same as I did. No point telling TRUE again though, they aren't listening.

D

Have you called True to have them come check out the line or offer an explanation? (sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't)

Yes, did that twice. Lats time they said the router was sitting on the TV box so it was getting too hot.

The fight went out of me about then...

D

I use OSX and have found that for a very long time, I cannot use usenet or torrents in any meaningful way. Mostly, the throughput from my 4Mb line is less than I can and do get from my AIS EDGE connection. So I may need to rip TRUE out altogether and just use a modem - take a 20 year step backwards in technology because that seems to be the reality in Thailand.

Before I do that, does anyone get good speeds using OSX and does it have anything to do with OSX as opposed to TRUE incompetence? If you have any good technical advice, please let me know.

HELP!

D

Thanks UBC for making me get off my arse and get a better satelitte.

The major cause of stress, as any psychologist will tell you, is to be found the difference between what you expect and what you get. The problem with Thailand is not what you get in Thailand but what you expect to get in Thailand, and don't.

Thailand is a developing nation, full of people learning how to reach even a basic level of achievement. The problem is that most Thais believe not that they are behind everyone else but that they are in fact ahead of everyone else and that being a Thai is prima facae evidence of being in a position of great privilege. It is sort of like a cross-country runner being so far behind everyone else that he can't see the others at all, and therefore concludes he is in the lead of some other race entirely. They don't have anything to learn from lesser races and they therefore don' t even trouble to listen to what other races say. It is (as any psychologist will also tell you), quite delusional but it is normal for Thailand.

Thai internet is a joke. Thai technical service is a joke. And Thai customer service is even more of a joke than that.

But it all comes from expecting Thais to be as good as at anything as people are in Europe or USA and being disappointed. (Except ripping off copyright stuff of course, they are better than most at that).

Now, that having been dealt with, on to business.

Where do i buy a new satellite dish that gives me decent TV, because I, like you, have had a pocket full of TRUE. It is no wonder to me that they are going broke. I understand why even if they don't.

D

Which usenet service provider are you using?

How many connections to the server?

Mac OS X use NZBDrop or Unison.

Perhaps True are throttling the standard port. Try a usenet provider that offers multiple ports such as easynews.com or ssl on usenetserver.com.

I can always max out my 4mb SME on nntp with 10 connections to usenetserver.com

Cheers. I am using Unison but Xnntp and pineapple are the same, 5 connections generally. I use Usenet news but news demon is the same. Using port 119, and that was my first thought, I will try ssl. I get good throughput from binary website downloads and torrent, but nntp is disastrous.

I am pretty sure it was the same when I was at a different address, so it may be the port is throttled as you suggest.

True Move is truly catastrophic sometimes, and now they blithely tell me their engineers don't know what usenet is. Nor nntp protocol. They think I am stupid and really mean website servers.

My speeds on usenet are appalling and the servers are constantly timing out. There is no point talking to True Move because they clearly don't understand the business they are in and are probably only dimly aware they are alive.

Does anyone else have this problem? Any suggestions for a fix? Torrent speeds (surprisingly) are pretty good overall but usenet is a trickle. I am using an iMAc with OSX Leopard and have tweaked the buffers to try and coax some additional speed but to no avail.

Any suggestions out there?

D

if you buy a condo and sell it within 5 years, apparently you need to pay business tax (5% or or thereabouts as I understand it). Some months ago, in order to stimulate the property market, this was reduced to 1.1%. The law has apparently been promulgated, Land department has implemented it but apparently the Revenue Department are delaying - presumably because they don't have any money.

Does anyone have better information or does anyone know when the reduction is coming into force? I have a condo that I and the buyer would quite like to transfer quickly but 70k is a sum I would like not to have to pay if I have a choice...

All responses welcome.

D

Not sure if this is the right forum - apologies if not.

I am roundly fed up with TRUE group generally, and now TRUE Visions is stopping BBC Entertainment, I may just jump the leaking ship.

I have heard of alternatives (not sure if the broadband alternative will work well because their network is also pretty crappy where I am) but satellites and stuff is not really what I know about.

I would love to get BBC news and other Brit TV, movies (of course) and Aussie TV would be a real bonus. Not big on sport so that is not a factor.

Is there anyone out there can tell me if it can be done and if so how? Happy to buy dish and decoders, direct subscription (within reason) and whatever else is needed.

Any and all suggestions well received.

D

Well, I went to Ratchada and fronted the trolls. After an hour an asst Director turned up. A power-dressing throw-back from the yuppie era, complete with poncho (haven't even seen one of those for 20 years).

I had a rant (it was a somewhat ill-tempered rant as well - which I believed to be fully justified under the circs). The asst director with the poncho and the 'gold-tooth car saleswoman smile' seemed angry, probably at the loss of her face. Some of them looked embarrassed. Then their head of networking came in, listened to me telling him what the problem was and how to fix it (no, he didn't know either one). Asst director begged me to give them another chance to fix it, which I agreed to in the condition that I have a named person and phone number to contact if I ever get any more <deleted> from True Move. Then I left, with her promise of a named person ringing in my ears - which I never got of course.

She phoned me back on Thurs after having allowed the staff to get their story organised. A whole different attitude was in evidence, and she went on to say it was basically not a problem and anyway, if I used their servers instead of those on my ISP, it would all have been OK. She offered me 3 months free use of True Move, presumably that means another 3 months of bouncing emails... Then she blamed my ISP/webhost. Then she blamed me. I was waiting for her to blame the fairies. Or Buddha. Or Thaksin. Her whole attitude when I was not there to be in her face was smug, self-satisfied and somewhat irritating, or perhaps it was the memory of the poncho that irritated, I'm not sure. I told her to sharpen her pencil and call me back Friday morning having got a sharper pencil, and I am still waiting. Everything appears to be back to normal in the wonderful but slightly surreal world of True Move.

I asked in the original topic if anyone knew of anyone professional in the organisation, and someone commented with one word - NO. I guess he was right, certainly all the responses I got were negative about them. I am tempted to say that if the generally smugness and incompetence I experienced starts at or close to the top (it WAS an assistant director I was speaking with after all), then it is hardly surprising that the foot soldiers are equally incompetent and equally smug. Something Thais seem to be especially good at for some reason, or so I have found.

I think I will take their 3 months free (if it arrives) and when that is finished, tell them to Foxtrot Oscar and take their crappy overpriced TV package with them.

Score for True Move on my service-o-meter? 1 out of 10, must try harder. And I really only gave the 1 point because of the poncho - took me back a couple of decades. I admired her sense of humour for wearing it.

D

Anyone got any good ways to find someone in True Move that actually has a ounce of business sense?

Large True building on Ratchada at Rama 9 MRT, and across Ratchada at Fortune Tower are many True offices.

Thanks for the responses guys. I appreciate it.

I see a visit to Ratchada in my imminent future, I understand that is their head office (or one of them).

D