Sue’s Views: The joys of the digital age
I have concluded that some service providers have been put on this earth purely to suck the will to live right out of you.
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It’s official, after much dithering around the partner and I have plugged into the digital age at home. Let’s face it there are only so many reruns you can watch on pay-TV and the other half adopting the coffin position in front of the TV to watch WWE Vintage is enough to drive a girl to the red plonk.
All went relatively well and quite smoothly considering it was a state-owned enterprise we were dealing with. All installed we were raring to go. At this stage, I should point out the partner is very much a technophobe and his fat little fingers have a horrible habit of tapping buttons that are best left alone. Signed up for Netflix and it was all stations go. Aaah the joy of watching what you want, when you want and better yet no adverts, but then the bickering began. Documentary on conspiracy theories said he, no – something with a bit of eye-candy for me, I wailed.
Being more tech-savvy, I did have the upper hand and sailed through the choices at lightning speed so as not to give ‘he who hogs the remote control’ time to comprehend what was taking place. A week sped by and all was well in our digitally plugged-in world, until that terrible Tuesday when arriving home from work I was met by the partner. “Think the storm has knocked out the ADSL line,” he blurted out. In full alert mode, it was a case of twenty thousand questions from me “How do you know? Have you been watching on the sly without me? Did those little fingers of yours hit a button you shouldn’t have?”
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So it was off to inspect the ADSL line, which due to the storm was clinging limply to the telephone pole by a thread. Yep, that was it the line must be down. But still, I persisted and it’s off to the modem I go, which gave a splutter of life and then flatlined, and so started three weeks of being pushed from pillar to post by our state-owned telecommunications department. The keypad on my cell phone took a severe beating as I furiously stabbed out the 10210 number on countless occasions.
And so the day dawned when the ADSL messiah arrived and promptly informed us that it was not the line but the router that was faulty and we would have to trek up to Galleria, but he didn’t hold much hope of getting it sorted out. “What? This can’t be as its new and only used for a week,” I wittered, weak at the thought of Galleria in peak season.
Needless to say, the partner and I made the dastardly trip, only to be told by the consultant that despite the router being new it would have to be dispatched to the workshop for repair, which would only take place in January. Despair washed over me, three weeks later and I was no further forward. “Stop your wailing woman,” said the partner “I will deal with this.” And deal with it he did.
Later on the trip home, I asked him how he managed to get them to play ball. “Don’t mess with my internet,” says the technophobe. “And, besides I’ve found hundreds more WWE Vintage reruns to watch.”
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