More BT: Reasonable people might ask, WTF?

Today was spent in constant contact with BT, which does not imply that contact with anybody else has been made possible. The story: on Tuesday, I am promised that service will certainly begin on Wednesday, a mere four weeks from the time when the order was placed. On Wednesday, the service does not begin. On Thursday, your humble correspondent sends an angry note to his friend at BT requesting a joint effort to prevent intervention by Ofcom (the question of why regulatory agencies in this country have all borrowed their names from cheesy Margaret Atwood novels may be addressed at some other time). Later in the day a promise is offered that the situation will be addressed sometime before your humble correspondent bids farewell to a drooling senility. On Friday morning, your humble correspondent is told that service may already have begun -- it has not. He is then told that engineers have located a fault somewhere in the distribution network and that the problem will be repaired without an engineer having to be let into his home. He decides that there is no point in waiting at home, and so heads off to the office. On the way out the door, there is an engineer having to be let into his home. He does his mumbo jumbo, leaves, comes back again, does some more mumbo jumbo, and assures your humble correspondent that although his number has been changed, he should have service now. The existence of a dial tone appears to confirm these claims. Your now enthusiastic correspondent tries to call his wife and daughter -- no such luck. He tries to call his own office to see whether the line is working -- no such luck. He tries to call his own number from the mobile to see whether it rings -- no such luck. He calls his friend at BT again, we will see.

Working hypothesis: belatedly picking up the spirit of rebranding that once led a previous government to try to remove from the landscape every single pretty thing, BT has decided to repackage itself as the one-act play that Franz Kafka never wrote.

BT phone home

So it seems that BT is now promising, but firmly and sweetly promising, that I will have phone and internet service tomorrow. With the proviso of course that sve što su u stanju da brkaju najverovatnije i hoće, majke im kraljevske. But when that milestone is reached it is entirely possible that this blog may receive regular updates once more.

In the meantime, how does a poor boy remain in touch with the world? It is not easy, but one way is by sitting in my office, where today I received a quick lesson in the comparative culinary thrills of London and New York from a well-versed student. Another is by leaving to get a sandwich from the student takeout place, where another student introduced me to the works of his very charming heavy metal band.