Eggs and Bacon, Trials and Tribulations on the Line

Hi Orage and others who may have been wondering about my protracted absence from the bloggersphere! No, I’m not being lazy, far from it! I'd got the date of my return from the Greek island of Kos (yes, I'd got the spelling wrong) wrong - it was 14 nights, not 10 nights. This meant I was scheduled to join my kids at their grandmother's place (just outside Clacton, by the sea on the east coast) more or less immediately on my return, having spent an additional night in a hotel in Gatwick due to a delay occurring to my return flight which meant I got back to the UK too late to travel on. Since then I have been pouring all my creative energies into fulfilling the commission I have spoken about previously having fallen behind schedule due to various other commitments. This latter endeavour has been complicated a little by the fact that my kids were scheduled to return to school later than I had been led to believe they were supposed to - and so for a few days the privacy I need to work in has been somewhat limited (they went back for the first time since the summer school holidays yesterday. The other problem I encountered upon my return home was a severely limited broadband internet connection, with the connection intermittent at best and failing completely to connect at worst!

Now it wasn’t my intention to update the blog again until I had completed the commissioned piece but I am visiting a friend’s place today who has a good fast broadband connection as I needed to quickly look up something for that piece. As I blundered into a blog I had not come across before I thought I’d take the opportunity to add it to the blog list (see right hand sidebar) and briefly update you all as to my progress. Called ‘Domestic Discipline Digest’ you can visit by clicking on the above picture taken from the blog, clicking on the blog title here or checking out the sidebar blog list. By the way; I have also added a reply from yours truly to a comment made on the previous entry which some of you may be interested in. Click here to read.

The problem with my home internet access is ongoing and is clearly due to electrical noise on the phone line. The phone sounds like eggs and bacon frying in a pan whenever it rains - and it is not exactly a desert here in the UK! As I said to someone else in an email recently by way of explanation: You are probably thinking 'just report it to the phone company'. In theory this sounds simplicity itself; in practice it is somewhat a pain in the arse! You see we don't get our phone line from the phone company (British Telecom),,, Oh no! We get our phone service by way of the post office (mail company) and oddly they are based in Ireland and don't seem to know what they are doing (although they get out a British Telecom engineer to fix the fault if they find it). Weird isn't it. I wonder if it is like that where you are in the world?

Here we get our electricity from the gas company (or is it the other way around?) and bank accounts and mobile phone contracts (and insurance and banking) through the local supermarket.

The utility companies are a real mess though. It was supposed to lower prices through increased competition - and perhaps it can lead to lower bills sometimes, when it all works - when anything goes wrong though, all hell breaks loose. And there are cases I have read in the UK press of people receiving multiple bills from different utility companies for the same service!

In our case; our telephones, internet router and internal wiring are all ours and our responsibility. We get the bill for our phone calls from the post office but rent the phone line from British Telecom, the phone company. The broadband service provider is someone else entirely, although their equipment rack is housed in the local British Telecom telephone exchange (to whom they pay rent to house it and provide access to the phone lines).

So guess what happens when there is noise on the line and the fault is intermittent and difficult to localize? Yeah! You got it! Everyone points the finger at everyone else and it goes around and around and around.... You get the picture. For now I’m off to get some more writing done and the blog will return to full service just as soon as I get the commissioned piece satisfactorily completed. At that point I intend to start to add some original creative content by yours truly on a weekly basis. Bye for now!