Arrived home to find a warning by the bus driver that by the time we got to Heathrow, the air would be polluted by the big oil fire. Actually it wasn't much, and we were so tired, I don't think we would have noticed.
We staggered in to find the front door glass panel broken. Apparently Bee's teenage party on Saturday night had had gatecrashers who when told they could not come in had smashed the door. Must have been a good party. It seems her friends came round next day to clean up, so there was not too much evidence. It seems the glass has to be special toughened glass and can't be got before Christmas. So now we have our nice Slovenian wreath in front of a broken window.
On Tuesday, our internet refused to work, and we had a series of frustrating phone calls with BT first wrestling with the voice mail system and then with the people who asked lots of irritating and irrelevant questions. If the system was working perfectly on Monday and on Tuesday morning the internet light on the router is cycling on and off, then the obvious answer is that the line is faulty. But BT tested the line and said it was OK. When we refused to accept this, they offered to do some more tests over the next 5 days. 5 days!!! how can you do your Christmas shopping without the internet.
Next day we decided that we had better check out the router, and the manufacturer advised us to get a firmware upgrade, which two emails later we received next morning. This improved the length of the cycling on and off, so you could occasionally get a connection, but made us suspicious of the router itself, as reviews on Amazon said it didn't always work. So we bought a different one, but surprise surprise, it cycled on and off too.
We declared war on BT, and eventually got them to put us through to the engineers, who were polite and apologetic (unlike the previous lot) and did some serious fault finding with us. After locating the main socket, helpfully placed 6 ft up on the wall by the front door, we wired the router to the test socket (this meant moving extension leads and plug adapters as well as the computer and router), where it still didn't work. Needless to say their tests all showed the line was OK, but the engineers at least rang us back and told us they would do more checks (as the previous lot had not even logged the fault).
We were given 3 numbers to ring back to get the results.
Next morning we got up and found the internet was working normally! A BT engineer rang us, and when he found this out, was extremely rude telling us that we should not have bothered them. But we had changed every piece of kit on the phone line, tried it with three computers in the house, changed the router, and still couldn't get a decent internet connection. So who was wasting whose time?
Now I have a spare router which I shall have to take back or sell on EBay.
And now it seems the Freeview TV box isn't working.....
