August 26, 2016
The good news, the telecommunications engineer turned up only an hour late and was very nice. He agreed it must be awful to be without wifi for eight days. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort you out in no time.’
My cat Freckles appeared and offered her services as an assistant. She seemed confident. Everything was going to be fine.
The engineer took out a new router, plugged it in and turned on the juice. Nothing. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me. ‘I’ll just run a line test.’
Freckles was still optimistic. ‘Stay positive,’ she seemed to say.
While the engineer ran yet another test he told me how he’d once fallen off some scaffolding. ‘Twelve feet,’ he said. ‘Broke two ribs and a vertebra.’
I imagined him slipping and falling. In my mind’s eye he landed with a loud oomph and a clang. ‘That’s gotta hurt,’ I said. He frowned. Freckles frowned.
‘You’ve got a line problem,’ he said ‘You’ll need a BT engineer.’ Don’t worry, he assured me. He would escalate the problem, code red.
Freckles gave me a look.
He escalated and after he left, I got a text. The BT engineer will visit in five days.
August 27, 2016 (update)
The world of telecommunications is mysterious. My phone no longer receives calls, possibly since the engineer’s visit yesterday. Just now I got a call from someone asking for Pat. When I asked her what number she’d called, she gave me something completely different to my number. It sounded like a number you might call to get a fridge delivered. Let’s get something straight, BT. I refuse point blank to start delivering fridges.
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