RECONNECTED

Well, after all the weeks of nobody being able to get through to my landline number, and instead being immediately diverted to a kind of crackling limbo where they couldn’t even leave me a message telling me that they had, in fact, been trying to ring me, the telephone lines back to Lesser Blogfordshire have now been “fixed…”

Huzzah!! Let joy be unconfined, etc.

So now, any deathly inactivity on the part of my own telephonic life can only be blamed upon my own social shortcomings, and no longer can it be put down to any strange inadequacies of the age of technology.

Instead, the usual stark silence will fall again, and I will have categorical and emphatic proof of my own lack of popularity amongst anyone who’s ever met me, after my near half-century scuttling across the surface of this big ol’ world of ours.

Not that, in all honesty, I ever really expect anyone but my mother to ring me up, and at least, on the plus side, I can now be fairly sure that I won’t be getting the daily calls to work telling me that my phone isn’t working (I knew this…), and that I really ought to do something about it because it’s very important that she should be able to get hold of me in case any one of the billion and one dire emergencies that might befall her might actually occur.

Although, sometimes I’m still convinced that she’ll outlast the lot of us…

Anyway, having finally got the good people of India to accept the possibility that it might be a good thing if they actually sent a real person of an engineering persuasion, one with screwdrivers and everything, to look at my telephone system, I took the computer off my desk at work after having decided that it might be best to work at home for the day so that I might be in the house when he arrived, and to wait for one to actually turn up, which he did, and at pretty much the appointed time, too.

There was much plugging in of rinky-dinky little electronic gidgets, and much discussion about the nature of the problems I was having, although he didn’t venture all that far into our Temple of Tat, because he didn’t need to really. Something wasn’t working properly, but that something seemed to be a something that was outside his purview…

You see, it turns out that the fault on my telephone line was all my fault after all and now I shall have to pay the telephone company the princely sum of ninety-nine shiny new English pounds in order to pay for the privilege of now having had all of my telephone extensions disabled by the nice man, who ripped out the offending wire from his company’s lovely white box on the wall, and who then went on his way with the cheery manner of a man who knew that the 400,000 faults on record at any one time means that all of his future overtime is safely assured.

Joy, rapture, etc.

To be honest, it’s not as if they didn’t tell me that having to pay this fee would, in all likelihood, be the case. Apparently, if the fault is discovered to be caused by any of your own equipment, the standard charge mentioned above would have to be made. The lady at the call centre somewhere half way across the planet also suggested that I should pay my own engineer to investigate the problem before they sent their engineer out.

Not, I noted, that they had any suggestions as to where I would be able to find this telecommunications wizard.

Stupidly, I would have expected such a person to be working for, I dunno, a telecommunications company of some sort...

Anyway, that option, it appeared to me, seemed to suggest that I would need to call out (and pay) two engineers, one of whom might not be able to detect quite what the bigger problem was being caused by, whereas merely wasting the time of just the one engineer seemed as if it might be quite a sufficient and efficient solution for getting the problem solved, to my untrained mind. I know that I’m a simple-minded and naive innocent, but I do still hope for a world in which there are simple options, like, for example, if my telephone doesn’t work, I can perhaps ring the telephone company and they will send someone out to fix it.

I know... Crazy, isn’t it...? That’s exactly to sort of ridiculous thinking that got me where I am today...

Of course, now it turns out that I will need to call out another engineer anyway if I want any of the extensions to work, so that plan worked rather well, didn’t it…?

Anyway, it turns out that “somewhere” in the wiring in my house that connects to our two other sockets, there is a “short” which causes our various telephones to believe that I have lifted the receiver, even though, on most of these occasions lately, I patently had not.

Strangely enough, it also transpires that the telephone company’s responsibilities basically finish at the very first socket which comes into the house and that anything beyond that is somebody else’s problem, the “somebody else” in this instance, being, of course, me...

Mind you, it all appears to be working now, or at least, what’s left of my “network” is anyway. Not that you’d know from the endless stream of silences coming from the rest of the world which, it seems, has finally given up on me. Still the evening brought a lovely old text message from the telephone company telling me that they were “Sorry about my phone fault but it should be ok now” (I swear that these so-called professionals used the expression “ok” in their text message…), and that I “May need to restart my hub if I have broadband...”

You would really think that they ought to know for certain whether or not I actually have broadband, given the amount that I pay them for it each month...

Presumably, whilst that text message was being composed, the other hand was simultaneously typing out the bill to slide through my letterbox in a slightly embarrassed manner in a few days. At least I hope it has the good grace to act in a slightly embarrassed way…

Although, and whilst I really don’t want to get my hopes up here, there was no mention of whether or not they were going to charge me in that matey-sounding old text message.

Still, on the plus side, after all of that fun, my mother can now leave me her shopping lists again, which is nice, so all-in-all, it’s a “win-win” really.

I just sometimes wonder whether it will ever be my turn to win, that’s all…