EVERYTHING IS BROKEN…
Er… Hi, folks. Looks like my notification of demise was a little premature. Lesson to be learned here: unless you are certain that your departure from whatever sphere you are currently occupying is imminent, don’t make with the dramatic valedictions lest by appearing at your own wake, you look like a complete tit.
But before I tell the tale of my increasingly desperate attempts to cross back over from the dark land to which I had been exiled, I must pull a swift Sally Field (Oscars, 1985) & express baffled but delighted surprise at the reaction that my announcement engendered. So thanks & thanks again, Karen, Mike, Birdie & Meg. I’d actually thrown the fight & decided to wait for the ISP changeover that must come with the house move. But when I read your comments via my creaky old school computer, I battled the harder with the Lords of Misrule the following morning.
The tale itself is a dreary one, its principal components familiar to all who, through bank or insurance company or ISP cockups, have been forced to enter that most Dante-esque of contemporary environments, the Call Centre. But people, believe me when I say that no organisation anywhere in the technological world has the process as exquisitely refined as NTL. Here’s why I nearly threw the fight (& I’m going to go on a bit so skip a good 70% of this & you’ll still get the gist):
NTL has brought to a fine art that piquant combination of prolonged on-hold waiting against a soundtrack of music that makes you want to die interspersed with grovelling robot apologies for the wait, leading ultimately (& when you least expect it) to a customer service response from an android in the basement of a windowless building somewhere demanding a brief autobiography before they’ll even enter into conversation, which, almost as soon as it’s underway, is terminated because they’ve stuck you at the end of another Russian bread queue, which is manned by a partner android from the same low-grade 5.00-pm-Friday batch who also demands your life story, only to put you on hold the moment you begin to outline the nature of the problem, which action, without prior announcement, boots you to the end of the next queue, this one importuned by hyperactive, helium-voiced babes at a dangerous level of excitement advertising the NTL sports channel for the next 25 minutes, at the end of which balls-aching, mind-numbing, sob-inducing eternity suddenly you find yourself in the company of a heartbreakingly plausible young man with a deep, calm doctor-at-the-bedside voice who promises you that it’s going to be all right, that you’re not to cry & that all he has to do is make a few internal ‘phone calls &, within 2 hours, maybe 3, the problem will melt away & the sky will be blue & there’ll be cream cakes for tea again, but that you’ll have to ring off now while he buckles up & goes to work on your behalf & then he’ll ring you back, but start trying the system in a couple of hours & it’ll be sparking away good as new…
So you put down the throbbing ‘phone, stretch luxuriously & go to work with a song in your heart & a spring in your step. And when you return some 4 hours later, it is with breezy confidence that you fling wide the cupboard doors…to find that it is still bare.
And so, as the sun sets & shadows gather, you pick up the ‘phone once more & enter the dread realm, this time opting for the broadband technical backup service, having once, during a previous expedition into digital Mordor, actually encountered authentic, carbon-based human units with qualities sometimes identifiable as typical of the species – patience, humour, expertise, resourcefulness, all resting on a foundation of basic intelligence, &, indeed, after 25 minutes of music such as is used during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, one such hero comes to your aid - Andrew, with rich South Wales accent (the call centre is in Cardiff) & the air of one who could do his job blindfolded, earplugged & handcuffed, but, after 10 minutes of consultation & some rummaging around in the original installation disk he regrets with all the deep melancholia of his race that he can do nothing until you purchase an Ethernet cable so that an attempt could be made to bypass the conventional routes & register you as a new customer, but, of course, you never find him again during the subsequent hours of increasingly desperate wandering through the dark corridors of the vast NTL empire, any account of which, for the forbearance of any readers who have got this far at least, must be condensed in the telling; as now follows: protracted & very patient advice from 3 very serious Indians, one after the other, based on the premise that it was your computer that was at fault & involving, as practical action, the uninstalling of the NTL software drivers & the recommendation, when they wouldn’t reinstall from your disk, that you take your pc into the local IT doctor, & after that a session with a sales team member & then the department manager (when you finally break &, fired by the eloquence of the truly righteously angry, threaten a lengthy letter to Computeractive magazine, which seems to feature an NTL horror story a week) resulting in a promise that a new disk would be rushed in a fast vehicle from Luton (which is only 12 miles from here) & an emergency modem installation would be arranged as well within days rather than weeks…
Which is where the story nearly ends. You are grimly confident that no fast vehicle will screech to a halt outside your front door & that no installation date will be arranged & that therefore a great digital silence will descend until Year Zero at the new house when – no doubt after an interminable delay – a BT modem is installed & you start all over again.
And that’s very nearly what happened: no disk arrived & no installation arrangements were made. But, out of the blue & days after the last echoes of the music from hell had died away, the ‘phone rung & it was Andrew, that prince of Wales who had speculated success with the addition of an Ethernet lead. He had, he said, been bitterly disappointed that he had been unable to solve the reconnection problem & it had bothered him ever since. Now he had dumped a queue of 12 anguished callers in order to find out whether I had purchased the lead. I had & within 10 minutes he had my broadband connection restored.
So here I am, thanks to one individual’s common sense & motivation to help. And straight to the top of my Top 10 of Reasons to be Cheerful about life goes the kindness of strangers…
10:59:01 PM 
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