Wednesday 31 August 2016

BT and Other Woes.

At about 4.30 last Friday afternoon I was walking the lanes of the Shire when I spotted a British Telecom engineer dragging a length of cable across a verge and tying it around a pole. I recognised it as the piece that had been hanging 7ft above the road for about a week, ever since it had been partially brought down by a falling tree branch. I asked him what was going on.

'I came to replace the cable on the pole,' he said, 'but there wasn't a hoist available so I've had to cut it since it was dangerous.'

The upshot of this little incident is that a large part of the locality, including the whole of the main village, all properties in an adjoining lane, the village school, and me have been without phone and internet access since last Friday.

Many subsequent attempts to get BT to expedite the matter have brought only frustration, anger and another reminder that BT is the worst of all companies I've ever had to deal with in my entire life. They're easily the most damning expression of Mrs Thatcher's dreadful free market mania and most certainly shouldn't be running the British telecommunications network. Unfortunately, they are. The latest date I've been given for this simplest of repair jobs is 7th September.

I'm making this post from Ashbourne library, just in case anybody thinks I might have died. Sorry to disappoint. I expect I'll be up and running again eventually, but who knows? It just so happens that I'm also suffering the intermittent upsurge of five separate infections at the moment, so I'm not feeling very alive anyway. Maybe I'll force myself to see a doctor one of these days. I dislike seeing doctors because they tend to behave like authority figures and I'm allergic to authority figures.

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