Yesterday was the feast of St Barnabas - his particular gift being one of "encouragement" - and yesterday was such a day with the completion of our move as a family - with GCSEs finished and school left - the precious plants which would not fit in the (second) furniture van collected - and even BT offering courtesy calls to check how we were coping with the Broadband and phone-line problems.
Today in the real scale of thing should have been an opportunity to dip my toes into the waters of Synod at the Scottish Episcopal Church - but with another BT engineers visit promised between 8am (please God no!) and 1pm (that would be better!) and the really pressing need to phones which work and internet which stays connected the more mundane matters prevailed - and at least another stage of sorting the shelving in the study (yes we really did buy another 63 ivar shelves from Ikea on Tuesday!) has happened.
The world of BT is very very complex - so today I had a brilliantly helpful engineer stood in our hall saying that what was needed was a new fitting to give us a direct ADSL line which BT would pay for (it normally cost you over £200) but he was not allowed by Ofcom to fit it even though he had the parts in the van and it would take perhaps 5 minutes - no a seperate division from BT Open Reach would have to be come and fit that - and that he could loose his job and his division could be heavily fined if he ignored the new rules introduced five months ago to increase competition! Despite him phoning his senior manager on his blackberry, and me phoning my direct link into Durham HQ - even these senior managers could not waver the rules!
Apart from the new fitting the latest theory is that the local primary school (with its superduper Scottish 8meg wireless network) might be taking all the juice - which could at least explain why our wireless connection runs a 512K some of the time and 6000K at others.
Anyway at least the phones seem to be fixed and we can confirmed the main MTS number - and today got out broadband based "home-phone" system working - so we can begin to confirm that number - and it was good to hear this afternoon that a neighbours broadband was working better than ever - so it seems there has been a long-standing problem at our house which has been corrupting other peoples lines as well - but which hadn't shown up until muggins attached a MacPro and a new Dell laptop to it - plus three other bits of wireless gear.
It is intriguing how much I am dependent on phone and broadband communication - and the phone is particularly important at the start of a new role cos you actually speak to people about things which it would be inappropriate to presume in an email.
I moved from the US to Scotland 9 months ago, and had about a month of BT fiasco. Now the internet is working, but still not under my name (but don't tell them that b/c they just can't figure out how to change it).
I'm just floored that such a prominent company is so incompetent. The fact that they still have so many contracts just makes me really confused.
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