Whenever I see a BT (telecom provider) van in the road my heart drops. You just know something is going to go wrong with your phone, normally involving loosing broadband connection. Then many happy hours our spent talking to more monkeys about how you havent accidently unplugged the cable or blown a fuse, your net connection has been disconnected by them. I think their van drivers roam the streets at will, select somewhere they like the look of, then unplug and replug wires at random. When their desire to fiddle with cables is satiated they move on. This time the monkey was up the telegraph pole in front of our house. One minute we had a working telephone and DSL connection, then the monkey climbed the pole, then we had no telephone connection, nothing, not even a dial tone, just silence. First telephone call, explain the problem. Wait for the engineer ... wait ... wait ... Another phone call, apparently the problem is with our equipment. No it isnt its with your monkey up the pole, explain, wait ... wait ... wait. Another phone call resulted in someone wanting to know if we'd sorted the problem with our equipment, I explained not our equipment but your pole is wrong, but we did get promissed an engineer. Who arrived 8am Saturday morning, 'I understand there is a problem with your equipment.' Noooooo just climb up the pole and plug the wire leading to our house into wherever its supposed to go. This he did, and hey presto the telephone and DSL connections sparked back to life. So back to waiting for the evil monkey visits again ....
Whenever I see a BT (telecom provider) van...
They have registration numbers on their vans - why not write them down? And take pictures. And then blog 'em. Identify the monkey. If enough people did this we might start to get an idea whether there are only a few clueless meddlers repeatedly causing problems, or whether they're all bad. And BT might get the message.
(Or pigs might fly. I realise that the usual consumer solution of "use someone else" doesn't work when the alternative is NTL, or the alternative is nobroadband, and even local loop unbundling doesn't spare anyone from the prancing poofta of death)
