The phone line died at midday and stayed off until about 9 pm. No phone, no internet. I've noticed BT vans around a lot lately. They've been meddling with something and buggered something up. It's fixed now but when that lot get involved they can make quite a mess, so for the next few days at least there is a good chance of another spontaneous outage.
It wasn't all bad. Writing requires an absence of distractions so no phone, no online Sudoku, no Luxor (don't play that game, it's as addicitve as cocaine but then so is everything else) turned the afternoon into a productive one.
The bad part is that all my work, both book sales and consultancy, involves the internet. The companies I work for contact me by phone or Email so having both shut down together is a matter for concern. I don't want to get back online to find an Email offering me work, followed a few hours later by another saying 'never mind, we found someone'.
It also meant I wasn't distracted by reading the news which probably added about six days to my projected lifespan but leaves me with little to say.
Bah.
5 comments:
Bite the bullet and acquire a newer cell phone/smarter-than-its-user phone. NB I didn't say 'buy'-just speak to the nearest child.
Then have work emails sent to your cell as a back up.
Or get yourself a 3G wireless dongle as a backup. Credit isn't cheap so probably not for lots of general surfing and watching YouTube clips but you'll still get your email etc and be able to use the web.
I'm in Chichester, my BT internet died late on Monday night and only came back on Tuesday afternoon. I called friends in Nottingham and in Taunton (both BT 'net users) and they had the same problem, no internet.
Called the BT broadband helpline (where you have to listen to a computer) and was informed that their e-mail server was having 'problems'.
What was BT doing to their system that we do not know about? Installing eavesdropping equipment, perhaps?
Has someone been stealing the cables. A nearby town here (South Woodham Ferrers) has been without phones and Internet etc twice because of that.
It could have been cable theft although I think that would have left the phones down for more than a few hours.
I seem to remember a phone cable theft that cost thousands to repair, but once the thieves had stripped the insulation they would have found themselves with a lot of fibre-optic cable with no scrap value.
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