Yesterday I said that I was going to swear at the Internet company. After a dull morning at work, that’s what I did. The bloke with whom I spoke yesterday was a twit; insisting I do the obvious, even though I’d already done it. Today’s bloke was much more helpful. He explained that there was all sorts of work going on at their end, and that the internet connections would be problematical for the next ten days whilst it all settled down. In a spirit of helpful advice he mentioned in passing that my router needed to be plugged directly into the main phone socket: it couldn’t be plugged into an extension because that wouldn’t work any more. I told him that plugging the router directly into the main phone socket would be rather impractical. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing he told me to suck it up (fat boy!). Apparently in the new world order of broadband, routers don’t work on extensions. They might have done in the past; they won’t any more.
I thanked him for his helpful advice and hung up; mentally composing more of my letter of complaint to the internet provider.
So to prove what rubbish he was talking, I moved the router downstairs and plugged it into the main phone socket. Immediately ‘er indoors TM laptop sprung into life. Websites that had been hanging were now loading instantly. So we’d solved the problem. Or that is we’d solved one problem. Running cables from the living room all over the house was going to be somewhat problematical. So against my better judgement we set off to PC World and got a couple of wireless modems. (So much for economising!) With wireless modems in place, normal service was resumed. For a few minutes at least.
The internet connection is now far better than it was. It’s still stop-start: putting up this blog entry took over half an hour. But I’m being charitable and am putting that down to the thing being problematical like the company said it would be. It’s got ten days to get better.
In the meantime I phoned the internet company again and told them that the bloke with whom I spoke today was spot-on, really helpful, and should be commended, but that yesterday’s bloke was a twit.
And then (with the help of “My Boy TM ”) I took the off-cuts from last weekend’s decking project and made a garden box. In all honesty (and modesty) it’s a good box – you’d pay twenty quid for something like it at the garden centre. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with it, but making a box from the left-overs was something I could do that wouldn’t cost any money. Unfortunately these days, cheap is good.
I’ve managed to get a couple of coats of varnish on it. I’ll do something with it in the morning. I have plans to make a feature of it using the red chippings that were left over from last week’s gravelling project. There’s probably not enough stones to fill the box, but there are some large wood off-cuts that I can put in the bottom of the box to fill the space that stones would otherwise fill. After all, who’s going to see what’s under the top layer of stones anyway?
And talking of cheap being good and economising, the plan for tonight was a quiz night. But the quiz night was in a pub, and I know what I’m like where pubs are concerned. So whilst everyone else went out, I had a cheap night in. The plan was to watch some DVDs – I slept in front of the telly…
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