I'd planned to extoll the virtues of British Telecom on Saturday.
They were to transfer my number from my aunt's house to my new place. A charming call-centre lady told me it would be no problem, and that the change would occur at midnight on Friday.
"Yay" said I, noting that my Spanish friend was still waiting for the national phone company over there to connect her phone. 6 weeks and counting.
So on Saturday I plugged in my phone, picked up the receiver and... nothing... dead. On Monday I called the nice call-centre lady and listened to profuse apologies and a promise to send an engineer out.
And indeed, the engineer did come out. He couldn't find the fault. So he phoned a friend. He couldn't find the fault either. After two or three hours there were something like 5 engineers crawling over my house, trying to find the break in the line.
With this sort of exponential increase, I speculated that I might find myself with the entire workforce of British Telecom in my house by the end of the day. Maybe I could start my own phone company. Maybe I might get to meet the lady from the call-centre with the nice voice.
They found the fault. My house backs on to a lingerie shop (yes, really) and the phone line was routed through a false ceiling. They'd put up partitions for changing rooms and snipped through the line. For my team of engineers it was the work of a moment to reconnect the severed cable.
Sadly, they refused to fit a webcam.
