Incommunicado weekend

Down in Pembs this weekend.  Friday night B noticed that the little blue light on the BT internet hub was off, but we were going to be so we left it.  In the morning B reset it but nothing happened, and then we tried the phone. Dead.  No sound at all.

In order to use the mobile at Brian's house you have to
a) go outside - the walls are stone and there is no signal indoors
b) depending on the weather  you have to go up to the high spot  in the garden up the stairs and above the rockery or
c) stand on the bench which is on the common next to the house.
This is with Orange which has the best signal in Llandeloy - the others get no signal at all.

So we stood on the top of the garden (option b) and phoned BT.  After a few minutes of pressing 1  or 2 repeatedly I got into a queue - hadn't spoken to a person of course.  They said they would phone back in an hour so we didn't have to wait, so we left the mobile number and went into Haverfordwest to do some shopping.

3 hours later -  no call - we called BT again after lunch and B got through to a person (!) and we go told it would be 3 working days - ie 5 days from Saturday afternoon.  B asked for a refund on the line rental and the internet but the person in India didn't seem to understand that.  He is going to write to complain.  I did eventually get a text message to tell us the same thing an hour or so later. 

What rubbish service.

To add insult to injury we discovered that if B wanted to change his phone and broadband service to Orange instead of BT it would cost £29 per month.  If I wanted to do it I would pay £19 per month.  This is because BT own all the lines in Pembs and charge the line rental on top.  Despite the fact that the internet service has a maximum capacity of 1.5 meg and in the evenings sometimes get so slow it is   useless.  So B would then pay £10 more per month for a rubbish service.  There is something wrong with this.

We were thus  internet free for the weekend which was odd, and actually a bit inconvenient as there was something we wanted to do.