50 Shades of Grey BT...or how I get my kicks without a broadband connection

So it's come to this...after yet another week without the Internet and fruitless calls to BT I am going to dangle with a dongle.
And yet again I have to remind you that not everything is about 50 Shades of Grey! Though I will admit sometimes it might be more exciting if it were...
Could you imagine if BT Broadband calls were along those lines?!She ponders as she bites her lip...
Best not to think about that, we'd never be able to get through and it's bad enough now.
So trying hard not to get hot heated on the telephone to BT as I am told that whatever happens they can only provide me with a 256 service (that's a quarter of a meg), I try one last desperate time to get the answer I want to hear...
"So what you're telling me is that if I want a halfway decent service I will have to move?"
"No, just that due to your location thats the best we can do..."
I bite my lip but because he cannot see me it doesnt work and however long I keep him holding on I know he won't change his mind.
"It's never going to work," I say with tears in my eyes.
"Not really, I could say it might but my hands are tied..."
"What if I bought my own cable?"
"We're very strict about that sort of thing."
Aha I think I am getting to him.
"But it could be done? A kind of compromise.."
Foolish girl, I know I had him but compromise just isn't in their dictionary. They only deal in exclusive relationships. I've blown it.
"No," he says emphatically. "We can only do what I have said."
I have nothing to lose now.
"So what if I went with someone else?"
"That's up to you of course but no one will be able to give you a better service whatever they say..."
It's true if I want to use cables and wires there's no one else who can do it better. No one else who's got it in all the right places, who can go further and deeper. No one else with better connections.
It's galling to think how dependant I am. I shake back my hair and bite my lip again. Determined to get away once and for all secretly knowing that in the end I will be back despite myself.
But for now I will say goodbye and with dignity.
"You a forcing me," I say with a catch in my voice. I don't like to be forced to do anything. "you give me no option I am going to go mobile."
There'd is genuine regret in his voice. "I am sorry we can't help you but you have to understand our position we really are tied."
I put the phone down.
That's it the end I think sorrowfully.
I pick up the phone again and dial...
"Hi this is 3G can I interest you in a dongle....?"
I bite my lip, this could be the answer to all my prayers...

Update!

For those who may be wondering:

The dog is still alive and I am eternally grateful. She even chased a chicken the other day so we are through the worst and all I have to contend with now is the vet bill!

Thank you to everyone who helped me get through it all your words and comfort meant everything to me!

And the reason why I have not been able to write anything sooner

lack of Internet connection - AGAIN!!!!!!!

The Internet I fear is on its last legs and I don’t know whether I will be connected for very long.

The sad saga of the broadband service where I live just seems to get longer and more convoluted with the telling so I will, for your edification keep it short.

And simple.

The village is  roughly 4 miles from the main BT box which serves Stowmarket. The copper wire which extends these four miles has deteriorated so much that the village can only get up to 1Mb at best at its main connection box just outside the pub. I live a further quarter of a mile on and by the time the signal reaches me I can only get half a Mb – the speed of your basic dial up and that not very clearly.

Quite obviously that isn’t acceptable.

So at great expense I went alternative and sourced my Internet connection through the airwaves. At first it was fabulous and I was ecstatic.

But

All good stories have BUT.

But over the years it has got more and more frustrating because I get time outs which means no signal can get through to me. This means my broadband speed gets slower and slower resulting on some days with me getting no signal whatsoever.

I am told it is because of the trees and the fact that they grow. The leaves get int eh way all summer long and in the winter it is the wind and the cold that interferes.

Suffice to say all this means is that my ability to stay connected is being severely tested.

Although there is hope.

Strange things have been going on outside the pub and rumour has it that BT Infinity may be descending on our quiet backwater…

If it does…

WATCH THIS SPACE!!!!!!!!!

City Men: Country Wives - Drowning not waving!

The Money Pit!

Today I sat on the stairs and bawled my eyes out in front of my best mate. J said  little but just looked at me as I rambled on between hiccoughing sobs careless of my eye-makeup, careless of the snot dripping from my nose.

He’s the type of guy you feel safe to do this in front of, it’s why we chose him, to be Godfather to Bog Boy after all. There needed to be someone here that could act as a buffer for me and the children when it all gets on top of me.

And today I felt like I was drowning not waving…

I remarked it doesn’t take much anymore to have me off in hysterics. But honestly I haven’t cried like this for years. Some say it’s cathartic to have a jolly good cry perhaps they are right. My eyes ache now and I feel like it must be at least midnight but there again the utter exhaustion may help me sleep better and tomorrow will be brighter.

It certainly felt anything but bright at 2pm this afternoon as I sat there snot dripping.

“I hate this place, I loathe it. I’m selling it!” I howled and punctuated my statement by stamping me feet on the stairs until they rattled.

The house was unmoved.

It’s heard it all before, especially from me.

“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t do it anymore.” I wailed.

I looked at J and I could see he was about to say that I could and I have done and I will so I forestalled him.

“I don’t want to do it anymore,” I heaved out between sobs, “I don’t want to cope. I want to make it stop!”

“I hate Suffolk. I hate this place. I never wanted to come here!” I continued to wail. “And the fact that I don’t have the Internet is just too much…”

We have the honour, nay privilege, of living in an Internet black spot and I have to get my connection with the big bad outside world via a convoluted and complicated network of routers and satellite dishes as BT  ain't that interested. It works, usually but every now and then, especially when I am on a deadline, it doesn't.

Then I have to get in touch with Ra. Ra is godlike but like most ancient gods one isn't actually too sure they exist. I have evidence that people round here believe he exists but I haven't actually seen him in so long that I fear he is now mere legend. He NEVER answers his phone and he NEVER tells you what is going on. So I tend to leave increasingly and frequently more and more bizarre messages in my efforts to contact him and more importantly getting him to contact me to say that he has heard what I am saying and that he know and is dealing with t4he problem. NOW!

You get the God like drift here. Basically you have to put your trust in Ra and he will deliver.

Sometime though I actually need to hear that on the telephone. And after four hours of futile calls. texts and general frustration it was all too much.

J gave me a great big hug and I sobbed some more leaving a nice snotty trail down the front of his jumper.

He held onto my shoulders and looked me in the eye: “It’s not just about the fact that you don’t have the Internet again is it,” he said.

That man knows me too well.

Of course it wasn’t about the Internet though as I said it was the last straw.

Suffolk is a funny place. You actually have to want to go there as it’s not on the way to anywhere in particular. It’s sort of a dead end. A bucolic, slightly dirty and otherworldly, dead end with a Nuclear reactor on its coast.

I am sure there are plenty of people who love Suffolk but having been dragged here by my husband seemingly on a whim because he said so with no  real thought having gone into it a decade before I am still kind of immune to its charms.

I know I should have got over myself but when things like the Internet goes down for four days and I cannot do my work let alone blog or tweet or indeed even email it just reinforces how terribly isolated the place is.

I did SO love London and I had SUCH a great job, one I enjoyed and was actually good at and having to give that all up to take on a 500 year old decrepit house (even if I was one half of the idiot pair that fell head over heels in love with it and bought it willy nilly) spend ten years doing it up, squandering oodles, and I mean oodles, of thousands of pounds on it foregoing holidays, new clothes, new cars and god know what else – it sometimes just doesn’t feel worth it.

Not when I still have oodles and oodles STILL needing spent on the damn place because I got diddled by the original builders we employed (but that’s another story).

So sitting in those stairs eye makeup smeared down my face, snot dripping and hiccoughing I admitted it.

“Charlie is going to London!” I broke down into hysterical sobs again. “It wasn’t part of the deal!”

No the deal stated that if I did HAVE to go and live in the back of beyond HE was going to be coming home every night – because after all I HAD given up and AWFUL lot.

But times change and sometimes you get new jobs and sometimes there is an economic downturn and your house has eaten up every last cent so your husband has to work harder than ever before and you’ll just have to accept that you need to be a tad more flexible about life.

But it doesn’t mean you have to like it.

And I don’t.

I don’t want Charlie to be renting out someone’s spare room during the week in London, I want him home not because of the deal but because I am going to miss him.

Terribly.

PS. It still pisses me something chronic though that the Internet is so unreliable…blooming backward county!

T'internet - just another little moan...

There we have it t'internet; and it is exactly that in our little backwater in the UK. Half a meg and £25 per month for the privilege. Bet there are a lot of other people out there who are paying through the nose for not very much. Have a look at some of those test your broadband speed sites and see if you are really getting what you paid for. It is quite scary how many people are not!
One of my favourite sites is Broadband Speedchecker despite what TalkTalk, BT. Virgin, Sky and various others say in my area you cannot get decent broadband speeds because we are too far away from the exchange. Doesn't stop the phone companies from trying to promise things they can't deliver and they will fudge the language around so much that in the end you land up thinking the whole lot are a load of charlatans.
There are a number of black spots in the UK and around those a whole load more brown spots, places where you can get broadband but not as fast as they will try to lead you top believe.
So before you sign up to a two year contract mosey on down to the speed checker sites for your area and challenge what these companies are selling cos in the end the small print is going to say its your own fault for not looking at the semantics in the first place!

Held hostage by the internet or not as the case maybe...

My cyberlife is in melt down. I have been sobbing in sheer frustration and utter despair for the last half hour; it's not a pretty sight. I even got on the phone to my husband and caught him still on the train, where of course he could not talk to me, as I ranted about the unfairness of it all.
It has been a bad eight weeks, a cyberlifetime, if you get what I mean. Unable to comunicate across the ether, a hostage to my ISP. The sheer frustration.
I begin to look with more than envy at those with uber fast broadband. And I realise how incredibly precious it has been for me; what a life line it is and how when it goes awry, how utterly vulnerable I am in my splendid isolation in Suffolk.
For without it I cannot work. It's that simple.
No reliable internet and I cannot work, there is no income for me.
Maybe my husband does earn enough for both but that is not the point. Without internet I have NO choice.
It was brought home to me very forcibly when we got back from a weekend in Serbia  (it was for a family christening) and I read that the publisher of my magazine was restructuring and getting rid of a lot of print versions as these are seen as passe and frankly don't generate enough profit. It looks like my job is on the line but there again withtout the internet my job was already on the line.
And as for  blogging, something I love, well that's on the line too.
I feel like I am stranded on an island and I am watching the ship sail away....

One sided conversations…with my ISP provider

Ring ring ring ring…

Hello this is the O2 Answering service. I am sorry but the person you are calling is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone with your name and number and the person you are calling will get back to you as soon as possible.

Oh um yes Hi ISP people. It’s me Tattie Weasle. Um calling about the fact that I am not connected…

I called you yesterday and the day before and um in fact I’ve called you every day for the last fortnight but um you haven’t called back.

Are you still trading?

It would kinda be good to know so that if you are not trading I can try and get connected elsewhere. I’d rather not be connected elsewhere because I feel I’d be jumping from the frying pan into the fire but you know at least I know more about the frying pan than I know about the fire, if you get what I mean, and anyway I am not sure the fire can get me connected even though it says I can because the woodsmen (aka BT Engineers) say that the wood used is not the right wood and wouldn’t get me connected for anything despite what the fire says…

OK maybe you are not good on analogies but basically if you don’t contact me I will be forced to go elsewhere even though there isn’t really anyone else I can go to and I know that you know that that is the situation…

(For those out of the loop, due to the quirks of BT you cannot get a halfway decent landline broadband connection where I live so I have to connect to the internet via a complicated and frankly archaic ground-based satellite hop which costs me an arm and a leg. I am not kidding when I say you get better and faster and more reliable connection from the top of Mount Everest)

God I love the countryside! (Not)

So Um ISP people call me, anytime, I have nothing better to do because now that I have no reliable internet I am more than likely to lose my job and all my friends and get had by the DVLA and the HMRC ‘cos you know they think everyone has been connected because it’s something they say should happen but you know it’s all talk….

Well have a nice day and feel free to call, or post a letter, or a carrier pigeon…

Nothing else to do. Really nothing …But wait for you, you know to contact me, the person who pays… the customer….Bye now. Call anytime. Bye. ….

Am I out of the ether yet? The joy of living in a broadband black spot.

Call me odd but when I have no broadband connection I’m OK. Really. I. Am. Fine. I can’t work but everyone needs a break from that don’t they? All work and no play makes jack a dull boy and all that. Sometimes it is quite good to be in a broadband black spot.

But I get a tad upset when I am neither one thing nor the other. I get upset when I am nearly connected but not quite because that means I have to work even though my work isn’t actually all going to get there. Today I lost a potential job worth £200 because my broadband failed at the "moment juste" and I landed up missing the deadline. Great.

On top of that I got tagged but I don’t know why. It was exceedingly frustrating. I tried to raise twitter on my mobile but to be honest I’m not actually sure how to do that and all I got off Exmoor Jane’s blog was a rather alarming picture of a yawning cat. I do not know why I have been tagged and what that tag has to do with a yawning cat. However much I tried, and I promise I did try all day, I have yet to be illuminated on this point. I even went to such lengths as seeing if I could sneak a peek on one of the computers at school and failing miserably because twitter is banned as an inappropriate site. Thank God there are no wailing alarms on those machines as I don’t know quite how I would have explained myself and why I was hunched on a small child’s chair trying to hack into a site on one of the school computers.

I spend a lot of time waiting for my broadband connection to connect sometimes it is fantastic, sometimes slow and always it is unpredictable.

I get it through the ether as BT cannot connect me and as one delightful soul at their head office said once the only way they will connect me is if I move. Bless ‘em for their consideration.

I read today that Suffolk is to get some help to get connected, I won’t hold my breath. For even though the county may get help, it certainly won’t be to connect out of the way villages. Actually my village isn’t out of the way it’s just that it is at the end of a line and by the time it reaches us it’s exhausted and we barely raise half a Meg (512). I am at the far end of the village so that half a Meg gets disconnected a lot as well as more and more people try to connect to the outside world and even though TalkTalk and all the others say: “Of course we can connect you!” The tech boys who have to plug it all in say: “Don’t bother it won’t work.” So in our village I’ve heard that kids have to go and do their homework with friends in to other villages or else trek down to the library, which is due to close.

The reason why BT won’t do anything about it is there are too few of us to matter. So we go our own way and I get my broadband over the ether and pay through the nose for the privilege. Problem is when it goes wrong there is only a tiny little company that can put it right and I worry about their ability to stay afloat. I have to pray they will or else I will lose my job.

So does anyone out there know how I can get broadband without using a telephone line….I really do want to stay connected and call me weird but I also want to stay in my own home while I do it…