Regular followers of our twitter feed will no doubt be aware that we have experienced some short-comings regarding telephonic and interwebular connectivity of late. It all happened one Thursday evening a fortnight ago when our connection to the outside world – the one other than us just looking out the window – went dead. It pains me to recall too much of what happened next, but I shall do so as some day historians will likely need this kind of information.
BT told me they would fix my fault on the following Monday. Ok, I can live with that – we’ll have to just go outside the door to talk to people. We’ve heard this is what people used to do. How bad can it be?
Monday came. Monday went. Another call to BT. Stuart from Bangalore tells me “Oh yes the fault is in our network and our engineers are busy working on it right at this moment. It’s a terribly difficult problem”.
Tuesday came, my teeth got all gnashed. “Eamonn from the same Bangalore office. Oh yes, they are working right now. It will be fixed by 23:59 tonight”.
Wednesday… Ajay and Suresh, similar stories. Engineers are just fixing the line as we speak. So I braved the great outdoors – as far as my car – and drove into our village following the line of poles all the way to the exchange. Whereupon there was indeed a BT Openreach chap absolutely delighted to see me but alas we were not on his list of fixes.
Back to the phone and speak to Palash who begs me to stop calling but tells me that the other “advisers” had told me lies – there were, he said, insufficient engineers to get my problem fixed before the following Wednesday – a whole 2 weeks, almost, after the line went dead.
So I declared Twitter War on BT with my main thread being the huge amount of money BT spent on securing the TV rights to Premier League football. You can scroll through my digs in the Twitter thingy on the left. Suffice to say, it pays to complain; loudly, often and irritatingly – due to my efforts our fault got fixed fully 20 minutes ahead of schedule. And herewith the photographs of the relevant players in the eventual repair : pole A; pole B; pole B’s aging monikers; Dave Howard BT engineer and wire-splicer par-excellence.
Anyway, Dave, now a hero here at Telegraph Pole Towers enjoyed a beverage of PG Tips brought to him in a TP Society mug by Mrs TPAS in exultant gratitude that I’d finally stopped whingeing, endlessly, on and on and on, about the bloody phone line.
Finally, I have a souvenir of the whole episode by way of a photo of Dave’s moniker which he newly nailed to the foot of pole A.