Last Saturday I went to make a phone call using my landline - something I only do at the weekends because I get free calls then. I use my mobile at all other times as I have so many inclusive minutes in my tariff that it would seem silly not too. Except of course when I can't but more on that in a minute. Anyway, back to making this phone call... The line was dead. Nyet. Nada. Now I have one of those fancy Bang and Olufsen cordless phones (a gift from my sister I hasten to add). I assumed it must be that the clever phone wasn't working, so went in search of my trustee old "plug the wire in and lift the handset" kind of phone. Nope, that didn't work either. Hmm. I tried all the sockets in the house. All dead. But my Internet connection was still okay - I have broadband supplied by O2 but dependent on my BT landline of course. I rang my father, as I usually do when i have problems of a technical or electrical nature. He'd know what to do. His suggestion was that I try unplugging everything and starting again, in case one device was causing a problem. That sounded perfectly sensible and was precisely what I did. Of course this was the point at which my Internet connection went the same way as the dial tone. Dead. Oh dear. Now I had nothing. By this time, I was running late for an appointment and had to head off out. As I emerged from my side street I became accutely aware of a number of BT Openreach vans parked up on the side of the road with men working at one of the those green boxes (look here if you ever wondered what they were for). Coincidence? I doubted it but hoped that whatever the problem, they would soon have it fixed.
When I returned later that evening there was still no phone and still no Internet. The first place I turn to for help (and I suspect a lot of you do too) is the web: usually Google. Life with no Internet was going to be tough. Of course the more astute of you (and those who know me) would have commented "but what about your iPhone or you iPad... can't you use those?" The iPad is wifi only - I couldn't justify the extra expense of a 3G enabled one and then there is the whole issue of a mobile data tariff. And the iPhone? Something happened back in September whereby the O2 signal strength in my area of Reading plummeted from 4-5 bars to often only one. 3G is similarly noticeable by its absence. In fact I frequently drop calls made from home on my iPhone. I'll leave it to you to ponder whether it's the phone or network. Either way, it's not that useful. In fact, it was the whole reason for getting one of these free-call packages from BT. (Oh, by the way there is a sting in that tail... I received my phone bill the other month having used my landline to make a couple of local calls outside of my "free time" and was charged at more than £0.20 per minute!)
So, no phone, no Internet. I rang BT. Or a tried. You can't ring a free-phone 0800 number from a mobile, or at least not for free. O2 told me to drop the initial 0 and dial again, pointing out that I would be billed for the call at my standard rate. BT then suggested (having apparently noticed that I was calling from a mobile) that I should redial using an 030 number. Why didn't they print that in the back of the BT bill too? Having pressed 1, 1, 2, 1, (or some other combination) plus entering my home number and my mobile number, I eventually get to "speak" to a machine. The machine tells me it was going to check my line and I shouldn't hang up. Okay, I don't. But I did have to listen to recorded messages telling how much I can do via the Internet. Except I couldn't of course - I didn't have a phone line! Finally, the machine concluded that I did have a fault "somewhere between the Exchange and my property" which would require an engineer to sort out and would take 3 working days to fix. I opted to receive updates by SMS and wondered how I would cope for a full four more days without the Net (Sunday not being counted as a working day). My iPhone chimed (text messages seem to come through okay) and the text from BT said that my fault would be fixed in 10 days and not in the initial three!! Now I began to panic. I opened a bottle of wine and sat down in front of the TV.
I've not been viewing much broadcast TV. There never seems to be much on. Or at least not after the News at Ten, when I finally get in from work and the gym. I'd become accustomed to BBC iPlayer/ITV Player on the PS3 and to downloading/renting content on the Apple TV. Neither of these now worked, of course. In fact, I became accutely aware of just how much I depended on the Internet. No access to the Remote Desktop at work (and I've been trying lately to reduce the amount of stuff I print out so it's all online only). No online banking. No chatting to friends on MSN/Skype. No looking up those random thoughts on Wikipedia. Life seemed suddenly very dull without the Net. I got up and raided the DVD drawer instead. Fortunately, I had a collection of BlueRays given to me for Christmas that I'd not yet watched.
Sunday was a day spent on my motorbike. I coach bikers to help them pass their advanced bike test via the Thames Vale Advanced Motorcyclists - one of the biggest bike clubs in the country. Needless to say it rained later in the day and I got drenched. On Monday I was back at work and fully connected again. The iPhone and iPad apps were duly updated, Twitter feeds refreshed and life returned to its normal digital self. I was out Monday and on Tuesday received a wonderful text message from BT - all had been fixed, apparently.
I raced home after work with the expectation of being connected to the outside world again. And sure enough, I had a dial tone. I rebooted routers, wireless hubs, plugged back in clever phones and restarted Apple TV, PS3, laptop and all the other connected devices. Did it work? No!!! Bizarrely, and I've still not worked out why, only the left hand phone socket of the double-sockets I have in each room now works. I swapped the socket that my ADSL router plugs into and it all came back to life. On the basis that it all now works, I've decided to leave well alone. I don't need that many phone sockets anyway!
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