A mammoth undertaking

The shower isn’t the only electrical problem I’ve been having this week. I got home from work on Wednesday to find that the internet was down. That usually means a call to my ISP, waiting on hold for half an hour, and then asking them to reset the target SNR on my phone line. But this time, when I picked up the phone to call them, I realised that I didn’t have a dial tone. The landline seemed to have gone down. I tried a few simple checks, unplugged the cordless phone and plugged a spare old-fashioned telephone into the master socket. Still nothing.

It’s actually surprisingly difficult to report a line fault to BT when you have neither a phone line or the internet! In the end I dug out an old phone book from the bottom of a cupboard, looked up the fault-line number the old-fashioned way, and called them from my mobile. You have to go through loads of automated menus, which I hate, before you finally get to speak to a person. But the line test that he then carried out showed up clear – it wasn’t the phone line itself that was at fault.

The earliest they could send an engineer out to investigate was today, which meant a whole day without internet access. I hadn’t realised how much I use it until it was taken away! I did work out how to use my phone as a hotspot, but I’m on such a stingy monthly data plan that I was wary of using that too heavily as it would get very expensive. Fortunately, it didn’t take the engineer long to diagnose and fix it once he turned up. He reckons that there must have been a lightning strike during the atrocious storm on Wednesday, as the master socket and the phone were both thoroughly shorted. If it was a lightning strike, I was very lucky that it only took out the phone and not something more critical. Like my roof for example!

He’s installed a new master socket, and my broadband is now back up and is marginally faster than before (though still what the ISP engineer euphemistically calls “very rural”). But I’ve not managed to find anywhere in Malvern that will actually sell me a cordless phone. I bought the last one from Waitrose, but they don’t seem to stock them any more. I bought the one before that from a specialised phone shop that is long closed. And I tried a phone accessory shop that has sprung up recently on the high street and they looked at me as if I was mad. A landline phone? No, they only dealt with mobiles. I could probably have found something from Argos on the out-of-town retail park, but instead have given in and ordered one from Amazon which will arrive tomorrow. Thus helping to ensure the death of the high street…..