Broadband access…

It seems the only time I have to write my blog entries is at the weekend. So where was last weekend’s I hear you ask? Good question. Internet access went off sometime Friday afternoon. I can tell you exactly when on Friday afternoon – 1.35pm.

Hallo – my name is Sian and I’m addicted to the Internet…. Oddly enough my broadband lights were on, but the Internet light was dead. Before faffing about with my settings I took the precaution of phoning neighbours. They were without internet access too. And it was Friday…… and we weren’t likely to get it fixed till early the following week…….. eek!

Anyway thought I’d better report it to my ISP and had a loooooong conversation with the call centre. Unfortunately no one else had as yet reported the problem so it took some persuading to convince this very nice chappy that indeed I *knew* it was a fault on our exchange and NOT ON MY MACHINE. Inside I was screaming….. externally hopefully I was being equally polite – I was brought up to be polite you know ;-) Forty-five minutes of being polite was something of a strain for me though…… And of course they ask you "when would be a suitable time for the engineer to call, Madam, morning, afternoon or evening?". I gave up trying to explain we were on an island and the local BT engineers would just know the boat schedules and said "Anytime" - nope had to pick one of three. Arrrrrghhhhh!

Fortunately I was staying with a friend in Stromness Friday night so could check email and send messages to warn folk I was “offline” for a while. I did finally get dial-up working but it was oh-so-s-l-o-w that I only wanted to do emergency email with that! Funny how I used to be quite happy with dial-up speeds!

Anyway thankfully BT sent a local engineer out on the boat on Sunday to fix it!! So by Sunday evening everything was back to normal. Well speed was slow but faster than dial-up! And by Monday my system was back up to full speed. Though neighbours had to wait a while for some signal or other to be boosted for their speed.

Isn’t it scary how dependent one gets on technology? I use my computer a lot for work, and nowadays communicating as a “distance worker” is made much easier using a computer (skype, email, ftp sites etc). I kept telling myself I could be without broadband access for three or four days without it being a problem work-wise……. However for the sake of my sanity I’m glad I didn’t have to try it! Although on days off I tend not to spend much time at my computer – I know it’s *there* - so if I DO want to use it, well I can…..

So that’s my excuse for a lack of blogs last weekend. Well that and I have discovered I’m genetically linked to a Sloth……