Living in the Dark Ages

I have been noticeably absent from this blog for over a week now and it's mainly because we haven't gotten our internet connection sorted yet. That's a story in itself, actually.

D finally broke down middle of last week and called Bigpond to complain about the lack of network access. After being on hold and on the phone for the best part of his life, the customer service person (this would've been D in a previous life) said a technician was going to come on Saturday to check it out. D was pleasantly surprised as this type of prompt service was not the norm, at least when he last worked there.

The tech dude (TD) was scheduled to come between 7.30am and 12noon. Very big window, but that's how it works here.

D, being D, was up bright and early on Saturday (Saturday!) morning to make sure he was awake when the TD showed up. Before 7am! How rude.

Of course, TD arrives at 10.30am. He comes into the house, checks the modem and the connections, goes outside to check cable stuff, comes back into the house to check the modem and connections again, and then tells D that there's something wrong with the local area connection which had nothing to do with us.

Since this was not in TD's scope, he had to call it in for another TD to come and check the area connections.

Surprisingly, TD2 came that same afternoon to check on the area cables. I was about to leave for my massage at around 3pm, when TD2 knocks on our door and tells me he has bad news. Very bad news, apparently.

Our (idiot) neighbours had renovated their house a couple of months back and in the process of re-paving their driveway, paved over Telstra's access pit. This meant that TD2 couldn't access that particular cable section.

Of course, as you might have guessed, the faulty cable section had to be right under the inaccessible access pit. They would have to break through the repaved driveway, access the cable and then pave it back again.

Yes, what a nightmare. The good news is, as I was driving to work this morning, I noticed TD3s setting up in front of our (idiot) neighbours' driveway, getting ready to dig.

Hopefully, we'll have access by tonight. Yeah, right.

UPDATE: 6.30pm same day
Woohoo! We're back in business. We got our connection sor'ed.