Wrong number

Our domestic telephone circuit is provided by that unlovely agglomeration – British Telecom (BT) – with whom I have had many and various dealings over the years both in professional and personal capacities. As is the way in this neoteric age the medium nowadays serves a dual purpose, carrying – along with any telephone traffic – our broadband data connection. This latter is – counter-intuitively – actually provided by a different corporation altogether – our Internet Service Provider (or ‘ISP’ for TLA aficionados) of choice.

It is undoubtedly a sign of the times that whereas the telephone these days gets very little use the data traffic hums near constantly…

…until a couple of days ago – when it stopped!

Actually – that’s not strictly accurate. It didn’t so much stop – as go astray!

I was working on the InterWebNet late of the evening when I was somewhat taken aback to find the screen suddenly appropriated by an ISP warning message. What was particularly strange about this was that the message was not from our ISP! Now – I’ve worked in IT for a long time, but in this case it didn’t take a technical genius to work out that we had somehow been disconnected from our service provider and connected to someone else’s. Our ISP confirmed this the following morning when I called them from my office – informing me that as far as they could see no traffic had passed on our connection to them in the previous 12 hours.

There followed a morning of fruitless calls to both ISPs and to BT – each of which in turn metaphorically shrugged their shoulders and referred me to one of the other parties – something that I find happens all too often these days when dealing with customer ‘services’. Finally our ISP suggested that I call them from home – whilst at the computer – so that they could attempt a diagnosis in ‘real time’.

To that end once I had fought my way home from the office I seated myself in front of my PC and picked up the telephone. The line was dead! I hadn’t thought to check this the night before. Just to be on the safe side I thought I should check the line by calling the number from my mobile phone.

To my surprise the call was answered by someone else. Someone that I didn’t know!

Well, you will have worked out by now – as did I – that my entire connection had mysteriously been swapped with someone else’s – the classic crossed-line. I called BT… or rather – I tried to call BT. We played an inverted form of Russian Roulette through their automated call-centre system, with me being half a dozen times the recipient of the equivalent of the bullet to the brain (being bumped out after half a dozen steps because – apparently – I am ‘not a BT customer’… (I wish!)). Finally – by punching in a sequence of random digits in response to some arbitrary question or other I got through to a real live person. It didn’t take long for him to acknowledge that lines must indeed somehow have been crossed and to log the fault.

BT wasted no time. They cut us off from the provider to which we had inadvertently been transferred and left us with no connection at all! Five days on we still await some resolution. As we head to Canada first thing tomorrow morning I guess that there is a very real chance that the matter may not be resolved until the New Year.

The Kickass Canada Girl – who does not like to be parted from the InterWebNet – was not amused!