'Puter Troubles

I have a saga...

Just over a month ago, I had a large delivery truck come up the drive, drop off the parcels I was expecting and when the driver was turning to leave, the truck caught the phone line, stripped the insulation off about 3 metres of the phone line and stretched it. Consequently, when it rains (and funnily enough, we've had a bit of rain over the last two weeks), my broadband shuts down and I can't access the internet. Can you imagine how frustrating that is to an internet addict??

Anyway, at first I thought it was the actual modem, but after about two days and numerous phone calls testing this, that and the other thing, my IP narrowed it down to the phone line. So they rang Telstra, the major communication company here, who all the communications carriers have to go through for line rental, etc, and they guaranteed to have it fixed on 03 January 2007 or before if other commitments permit. This was on 22 December. As you can imagine, I wasn't impressed...but, so be it.

On Saturday, 23 December, two guys come out and had a look at things. Yippee!, I thought, Telstra's got their act together and the line is going to be fixed. Not so. These two came out to assess the problem, then informed me that because the poles carrying the line were on private property, they were not allowed to use their ladders to climb the pole and fix the problem. Telstra had to send in a cherry picker! Then, one of these blokes muttered something about getting it done on Tuesday, 27 December.

It is now 04 January and I haven't seen anyone since! Meanwhile, I'm still having problems with the connection. When it rains, I have no phone line and no internet connection. On top of that, I'm losing earnings because I can't access my website for work.

Yesterday, at about 5 pm, I rang and said that no-one has been to fix the fault. I was told that Telstra line technicians work until 7 pm and they could still come out. No sign of anyone. So, this morning I rang back (again) and after about half an hour, where the person I spoke to had to ring "admin", who had to ring Telstra, who had to ring the technician (don'tcha love bureaucracy?) to find out what happened. The technician told Telstra, who told "admin", who told the guy who took my call, who told me that Telstra guarantee to have it fixed by the end of business tomorrow, 05 January. Hang on, I thought, I've heard this before...

However, I'm not as gullible as all that - sooooo, I've set up an invoice at so many hours of lost income at so much per hour... and when all this is finally over and done with, I will be sending it to Telstra. I've also put a "must be paid no later than" phrase on the bottom of the invoice, too.

It will be interesting to see what happens and I'll keep you informed.

I'm actually most surprised that I have managed to get this post done in one go without it flying off somewhere into cyberspace!