Flindt on Friday: ‘Tis the season to revive dodgy connections
© Kathy Horniblow What better for Christmastime than a story of mystery and wonderment, a saga of struggle and strife and triumph against all the odds?
It’s a two-day winter’s tale, and the first day started particularly badly, when Cain the cat, after settling down nicely on my still-warm space rocket duvet (once I was out of the bed, of course), threw up everything he’d eaten in the past 24 hours, which mysteriously appeared to include moving spaghetti.
Then I got downstairs to find the router having a bit of a fit, with all its lights flashing green and red at random.
See also: Farmers Weekly Podcast Episode 61: Car v telehandler, broadband & foodbanks
About the author
Now, it hasn’t been well for some time, and we’ve grown accustomed to poor broadband. If someone used the landline, everything went dead.
But who uses the landline these days? Especially when it’s hard to talk over the background crackling and popping.
Broadband says no
This day was different; the broadband was continuously dead. And it was also the eve of the launch of a certain new book, to be sold almost exclusively via the internet.
(Bookshops don’t seem to like real farming books – although a Mr Clarkson is turning that tide for us.)
Once the quails’ eggs were out of the way, it was time to dig out the broadband file in the office. It has seen a lot of use recently, but each hideous journey through the call centre hoops has resulted in failure.
“If you replace this bit of kit/that bit of kit”, I’ve been earnestly assured over the past year, “All will be well; that’s what our tests tell us.”
So, next to the router is a new phone, a new thingummy filter, new sockets, new wires and even a new computer; but after a mysterious couple of days of improved performance, everything would degenerate rapidly.
This time, with another bestseller imminent, I set about my task with fiery fury. First call was to Fleur Telecom, who became our broadband provider in curious circumstances a few years ago.
I got straight through. There were a few keyboard taps, and I was quickly passed to their tech bods.
There were more taps on a keyboard. “You’ve got a PSTN failure” was the admirably abrupt diagnosis. “Ring BT and tell them.”
Straight talking
So I did. I got straight through. I had a little rant about how vital the internet was for selling and writing stuff, and how previous attempts to fix things only seemed to have temporary success. “Alex” couldn’t have been more helpful.
He asked if it was OK to call me “Charles” (answer: no – the last man to call me Charles lies in the Flindt vaults in Hinton Churchyard) and then promised an Openreach engineer first thing in the morning.
First thing in the morning, Jamie arrived – once he’d worked out where we were, which I thought was a tad ironic.
He cast a youthful eye over all our hardware without any tooth-sucking (“Nothing wrong there”), found and sorted a sad-looking junction box up the garden pole
(“Not the problem, but won’t have helped the crackling”), and then rang from the Bramdean exchange to triumphantly announce the discovery of – and I quote – a “dodgy” connection.
Success. For the first time in months, I could answer the landline without killing the broadband, and have a conversation without thinking I’m in a biscuit tin in a hailstorm.
I can flog books without losing vital delivery info, I can look up how to treat roundworms in cats, and I can even find the very old article by a pompous farmer saying broadband is nice to have but not really vital for farmers.
It’s a seasonal miracle. Merry Christmas.
