18 May 2011 (Wednesday) - Stuff


It was probably for the best that I was on a late start today. And it’s hardly surprising that I slept like a log last night.

As I had my brekkie there was a knock at the door. Bearing in mind the fun and games I’ve had with my leccie bill recently I was amazed to find a man from the leccie company. As he read the meter I explained that the leccie company had emailed me last week to ask for a meter reading. I also explained that I’d given them the meter reading, and they’ve already changed my bill accordingly. The nice man laughed. He said this happens all the time. Apparently there are three departments in charge of reading leccie meters (four if you include being emailed to read the thing yourself), and none of them communicate with each other at all. It’s quite possible to have three meter readings done in a week, and then be emailed to ask for your own reading.
The nice man went on to say that this is all changing; they are all being made redundant, and from September the only meter readings the leccie company will get will be those that customers provide themselves.

I then spent the morning worrying about my wireless modem. I bought the thing a couple of weeks ago when the Internet people started messing about with the Internet connection. The internet company did say to give it ten days to settle down, and that was just over ten days ago. Initially we were rebooting the router several times a day, but it has slowly got better. It’s now five days since we’ve had to reboot it. However the company did say that they would start the broadband speed high and slow it down till it stabilised. Two weeks ago I boasted of a connection speed of 9.5Mb; this morning it was down to 4.5Mb.
The problem I’ve had recently is the wireless modem. Last night I was having to unplug and replug it every five minutes to get it working. I suspect the problem is that I am running it through a very old USB hub.

Being on a late shift I had intended to go to Sainsbury’s to get lunch, but the Internet told me of terrible traffic delays in that part of the town. And going to Tesco meant I could drive past PC World on my way in to world. So that’s what I did.
The “Tech Guy” (or “Tech Gal”, to be precise) agreed with my theory that the old USB hub might be at fault. She also agreed that it might be a faulty modem. To be honest, I think she would have agreed with me if I had suggested that the fault was due to badly behaved magical pixies. It’s been my experience that these “Tech Bods” are at their best when dealing with people who know nothing; dealing with people who know something about computers scares them.
But she swapped the old modem for a new one which (so far) hasn’t played up too much. Let’s see how it goes before I splash out money I haven’t got on a USB hub…

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