Tempting Fate

I am not a religious person normally, but there are some days (like today) when I feel that there could well be a vengeful God directing earthly affairs. I should have known better than to comment on what a lovely morning it was this morning. I should have realised that it would draw attention and I would be made to suffer for my presumption.

Within half an hour of posting, I had a call from work: Our Edinburgh Office had lost its connection to the Internet (which is necessary for them to link into our company WAN) and none of the usual things had fixed it.

I have spent most of my day on the phone either to the Edinburgh Office, talking the Office Manager through various procedures with the networking kit, or in hold queues trying to get through to the technical support of both our primary and backup ADSL (Internet) providers. Our primary provider (BT) averaged queuing times of 20mins (sometimes as long as fifty!) and we got a different theory from each agent we spoke to – some of whom were downright unhelpful, some whom were helpful but could be of limited assistance because of network problems (not reassuring from the company providing the bulk of the national telephony infrastructure!)

Our backup provider (Bulldog) was almost impossible to talk to for most of the day. Every time I rang their support line I either ended up at the same poor soul’s voicemail, or a receptionist who said that I hadn’t reached Bulldog (but who refused to tell me who I had reached,) or receiving a message from the IVR saying that they couldn’t connect me at this time before cutting me off. Naturally our account manager was out of the office today and his assistant was in a meeting most of the morning.

As a result of all this incompetence and bad luck it wasn’t until late this afternoon that BT finally agreed to get an engineer to look at our line (although it will take them up to forty-eight hours to guarantee a fix.) When Bulldog finally contacted me, they were at least very helpful and as a result of their tests it now looks likely that the culprit for this whole debacle is the ADSL router.

If we’d been able to determine this at 10am this morning then I wouldn’t be leaving home in four hours to get on a 6am plane to Edinburgh to ‘show face’ and fix the problem.

So for the record (just in case The Fates are still listening): On balance I’ve had a dismal day and expect to have an even more miserable one tomorrow. Thanks a bundle!