15 March (Part 1) - Stretching the rules
Like everyone I know I am seriously fed up with being imprisoned by a
year long lockdown while in other parts of the UK things are beginning to open up. I
regard my sister’s friends with their
refusal to eat from other people’s dinner
plates and their insistence on sanitising their own tooth brush handles as
insane. They are entitled to their views but should hide themselves in a dungeon
if they wish to feel safe and not attempt to impose that nonsense on me.
Johnson’s various idiocies have now had a very direct effect on my family. A
lady in a care home with dementia no longer recognises her permitted visitor after too long an isolation.
Something else a callous uncaring Johnson must never be forgiven for.
Saturday was such a boring day that I seized the opportunity to stretch the
lockdown boundaries yesterday. I accepted an invitation to assist in moving furniture to
facilitate a house sale. Last time I checked everything to do with moving house is an exempt activity.
Today I did it again. My disabled daughter working from home and reliant on
on-line food deliveries lost her internet connection on Friday morning. As
far as I could tell from a distance her equipment was working fine, the router
showed a solid connection, so I rang the ISP. (It helps that the Technical
Director is a personal friend.)
His tests suggested there was a problem in BT’s exchange, certainly not at his
end. Late on Friday he reported the fault to the upstream carrier who did not
appear to do anything through the weekend.
This morning they said that the ISP was not authenticating their connection
which I was assured by my friend was BS.
It was then that I decided that helping a vulnerable person included fixing
the Internet connection of someone unable to leave her flat. It was a reasonable
excuse to get on a train with a complete set of spare parts, cable tester etc.
I’ll skip the testing procedure, suffice to say I found nothing wrong, the
router told me it could see the exchange but there was no internet.
As I was about to leave my daughter said her phone had a ‘funny’ dialling tone and sure enough it wasn’t
the familiar BT tone. I smelt a rat. Long story short, her 020 7608 number has
been changed to 020 7689 0080.
Some clown (contractor?) must have swapped line cards or rejumpered the main
frame so the router synced up on someone else’s net
connection but would not have had the correct log in, so no go!
Despite Openreach being informed they have still not corrected the mistake.