History Forum / General / British History / January 2007

Hi peeps. Late on parade. Went to the French Riviera for Christmas
(highly recommended), came back for New Year and found we had no
internet. And no phone. Do you wanna hear the story?

No? OK, well you're going to, anyway.

Rang Ote on 2nd Jan. We'll come tomorrow, they said. Or the day after.
Then they a wide area of this part of Athens had no phones. It would be
sorted tomorrow. Or the next day. Well, maybe everyone else was, but we
weren't. They came to us a fortnight later, on the same day my neighbour
in this apartment told me they had no phone, either. Ran upstairs. They
had no phone. On three successive days, Ote came three times. One said
it was an electrical problem and we need an electrician. The electrician
said it was an Ote problem. So an Ote man put in a new wire from the
street to the house, and charged us for it. Nice little earner.

The cable had been mowed by the gardener and it was damp. He's always
mowing cables. Few of the outside lights work and the magic gate doesn't
work. Still, eh.

But still had no internet, and neither did downstairs. That was a
fortnight ago. Both the neighbour and us contacted Ote to say we still
had no internet. She was fixed instantly from the Ote end. We weren't.
Ote said our connection was alright their end. The original Ote men and
the electrician all said our connection was alright this end. But we
still had no internet.

Every day we rang Ote and they began giving us the engineers' number.
But no one answered that number on several successive days. They'll come
soon, we were told. We had been told several times we were an emergency
and that they would be here very soon. But they never came. I couldn't
really go out, just in case. Eventually, on Monday, we were told that
Ote would come today, Friday, because we had registered our problem on
the 15th January (oh no we hadn't, we'd registered it on 2nd) and they
were still only dealing with problems registered on the 8th.

Anyway, the Ote man came today. My we box had been reset, he said,
looking at me accusingly. So it needed to be re-whatnotted, which he
did. He was gone within 20 minutes, leaving me to face several thousand
trashy emails about undelivered mail. (Anyone else get those?)

So the long and the short is, that we had to wait a fortnight for Ote to
repair a problem which Ote had caused. The only person who could have
reset the box in his numerous twiddlings, was the malaka who turned up
on the 15th, or whenever it was.

So, I'm back. What's been happening? How did the meeting in Vancouver
go? Did we all have an excellent Christmas? Have we all had a better
start to the New Year than I have?

The only good thing about being offline for so long, is that I've done
quite a bit of work!

Now, where shall I crosspost this?