IT is startling how dependent on the internet I’ve become.
But even more shocking was the hellish maelstrom into which I was plunged when my internet link was unaccountably severed.
On February 13 I asked BT to deal with a slight but irritating crackling noise on my telephone line.
Big mistake.
They sorted out the crackling but, so it seems, their engineers then made the situation far worse by somehow knocking off my broadband access to the outside world.
The only problem was that, at first, I didn’t realise they had done this.
Nor, apparently, did they.
So I had to spend days being passed from pillar to post as various departments of BT, Orange, and my modem provider Netgear tried to work out which technical gizmo wasn’t working properly and where it was located.
Of course, Orange and Netgear customer service staff also seem to be spread across the entire Indian sub-continent which only made the arcane computer checks they asked me to make all the more unintelligible.
At one point, I was holding the phone to my ear as I stretched over my desk prodding a biro into a tiny hole in my modem for 90 seconds to ‘re-set it’ while being guided by a cheery voice in Mumbai.
After various other tasks – which made me wonder if Jeremy Beadle had risen from the grave and was orchestrating my humiliation – it was eventually found that the modem seemed to be doing its job properly.
But only then, after Netgear’s Indian staff had pronounced my modem to be in good health, would Orange’s Indian staff accede to my request to conduct a line test.
When they did, they instantly found that there was a major ‘outage’.
This, by deduction, appeared to have been caused by BT’s ham-fisted attempt to correct the earlier fault so BT engineers were asked to revisit the scene of their mistake.
Six days later, I now have a phone that doesn’t accept incoming calls and a computer still without internet access – which is why this blog is coming courtesy of someone else’s computer.
Great.