Slightly over a week ago I lost broadband access at home. The usual ritual of restarting blinking boxes didn’t help so early this week I braced myself for patronisation and called up blueyonder technical support. They tried all the spells in their book, to no avail, and sent an engineer round yesterday. He checked the cables, changed the modem, chopped new connectors and occasionally disappear down the road to the local box. After a couple of hours of this he was out of ideas and booked me an appointment with some heavy-duty cable-laying guys.
In 17 days time.
He was the first to admit this sucked and optimistically suggested a another cancellation may get the job done earlier. Still, I need to get on to billing and customer services and give them an earful. A side-effect of his visit, I discovered later, is that blueyonder dial-up no longer works. This means my only interweb connection to the outside world is via my trusty Nokia 6230i.
So don’t rely on e-mail for urgent messages right now.