Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Cold turkey
Broadband failure on Friday afternoon. The second time in getting on for 18 months, so not too bad. Reappeared for about 5 minutes on Saturday morning then off for good. Phone the number in the book (luckily retained) and 5 minutes of key 5 if you have a problem and key 8 if you have a blue problem. Then got onto the (helpful) help desk lady in Bangalore or somewhere within a few hundred miles of there. 5 minutes on have I plugged the gray cable into the white box and have I turned the power on. Do I have a small screwdriver to hand? What about a long thin spike or a mobile phone? Much running around and crawling underneath the desk. Then 5 more minutes with Bangalore calling me on my mobile, at the end of which they said they would call me back after doing more remote tests. Phoned back Saturday morning with the announcement that there seemed to be a fault and would I like to get in touch with the BT PSTN people. Not clear why their wonderful help desk support system could not do this bit. Phoned them and logged a fault. Two similar text messages at 0800 on Monday morning announcing that an engineer was on the case. Phone call at 1100 from an engineer saying he had arrived in the area. Phone call at 1600 saying he had found a serious fault - something about water on the line. I wonder if the cable television people with their newer infrastructure have less of this? He needed to consult. Phone call at 0900 Tuesday telling me that the person he needed to consult was not in. But the fault would probably require a hole to be dug in the road. So all in all, quite attentive to the customer, but it looks as if I am going to be offline for at least a week, maybe a good bit more if Easter gets in the way.
So into cold turkey big time, so this from Garratt Lane. The good news was that this Internet Cafe was indeed in Garratt Lane but nowhere near where I remembered it to be. But at least it was on the route to Wetherspoons.
Had an odd experience in a Wimbledon Wetherspoons yesterday. The bar I was at was not particularly busy, but I had to wait maybe 5 minutes while the young barmaid served maybe half a dozen customers who had arrived after me but around the corner. They say you start to feel invisible in the face of the young as you get old. Pleasant enough barmaid but hopeless. Dim and slow. But while I was waiting, I suddenly got the urge to hurl an empty pint pot into the elaborate display of alco-pop bottles behind the bit of bar at which I was standing and then walk out. Quite a strong urge; not had anything like it since 35 years ago when I had an urge to wallop an allotment busy who was complaining about my dandelions or something. I was holding a large Irish-fashion heart bladed spade at the time so it was just as well that he was berating me from a safe distance. No idea how close to the throw I was. Let's hope not too close in case something of the sort happens again!
Digging the bed for the onion sets continuing on the current allotment, with the ground in pretty good condition for same. Should be ready to start banging them in some time over Easter. No signs of broad beans yet but there might be enough rhubard for lunch on Easter Sunday. Leaves a fresh green colour, quite differant to the fuller but duller green you get later in the year. Peach in flower; flower buds swelling on the rest of the fruit trees.
And for the tweeters, we can say that it the season for large thin thrush like birds - at least two of them - to land on our lawn. Mid brown backs, pale very speckled chests, long thin necks and long thin beak. Not, I thought, a regular thrush, not that we get very many of those. Ergo, some sort of a Spring traveller. I wonder what? The name fieldfare comes to mind for some reason.
Various interesting snippets from a recently acquired New York Review of Books: a generally good magazine, a cross between the TLS and the LRB with plenty of good quality writing. Maybe a bit light on the lit bit for some, but that does not bother me. One snippet being the factlet that a good proportion of the slaves who went from West Africa to the Americas had not been abucted in some raid, but had been expelled by their home village or tribe for some civil or criminal offence. They had nowhere to go and so were easy pickings. Not being in the home village was pretty much a death sentence anyway. I suppose that in such a tribe or village, the range of penalties was a bit limited. Death, fine or expulsion. Prisons and ASBOs not really options. And if we suppose the crime rate to be much the same as ours - perhaps rather higher given the stress of life in general in those parts in those times - that might easily lead to many expulsions. So, we get the picture of a very much nastier version of our sending people to Australia.
So into cold turkey big time, so this from Garratt Lane. The good news was that this Internet Cafe was indeed in Garratt Lane but nowhere near where I remembered it to be. But at least it was on the route to Wetherspoons.
Had an odd experience in a Wimbledon Wetherspoons yesterday. The bar I was at was not particularly busy, but I had to wait maybe 5 minutes while the young barmaid served maybe half a dozen customers who had arrived after me but around the corner. They say you start to feel invisible in the face of the young as you get old. Pleasant enough barmaid but hopeless. Dim and slow. But while I was waiting, I suddenly got the urge to hurl an empty pint pot into the elaborate display of alco-pop bottles behind the bit of bar at which I was standing and then walk out. Quite a strong urge; not had anything like it since 35 years ago when I had an urge to wallop an allotment busy who was complaining about my dandelions or something. I was holding a large Irish-fashion heart bladed spade at the time so it was just as well that he was berating me from a safe distance. No idea how close to the throw I was. Let's hope not too close in case something of the sort happens again!
Digging the bed for the onion sets continuing on the current allotment, with the ground in pretty good condition for same. Should be ready to start banging them in some time over Easter. No signs of broad beans yet but there might be enough rhubard for lunch on Easter Sunday. Leaves a fresh green colour, quite differant to the fuller but duller green you get later in the year. Peach in flower; flower buds swelling on the rest of the fruit trees.
And for the tweeters, we can say that it the season for large thin thrush like birds - at least two of them - to land on our lawn. Mid brown backs, pale very speckled chests, long thin necks and long thin beak. Not, I thought, a regular thrush, not that we get very many of those. Ergo, some sort of a Spring traveller. I wonder what? The name fieldfare comes to mind for some reason.
Various interesting snippets from a recently acquired New York Review of Books: a generally good magazine, a cross between the TLS and the LRB with plenty of good quality writing. Maybe a bit light on the lit bit for some, but that does not bother me. One snippet being the factlet that a good proportion of the slaves who went from West Africa to the Americas had not been abucted in some raid, but had been expelled by their home village or tribe for some civil or criminal offence. They had nowhere to go and so were easy pickings. Not being in the home village was pretty much a death sentence anyway. I suppose that in such a tribe or village, the range of penalties was a bit limited. Death, fine or expulsion. Prisons and ASBOs not really options. And if we suppose the crime rate to be much the same as ours - perhaps rather higher given the stress of life in general in those parts in those times - that might easily lead to many expulsions. So, we get the picture of a very much nastier version of our sending people to Australia.
# posted by Jim @ 10:09 AM 
