We’ve been away, or at least most of them went away and i stayed, then i went too and we all came back. They had a nice ten days and i had a nice 4 days and all would have been perfect if life hadn’t reasserted itself right at the end and left us with a sour note back here that we haven’t yet shaken off. I’m feeling a bit churlish about that; i only had a short holiday and i’m a bit annoyed that i couldn’t be accommodated to spend one day of it with people i wanted to see without being subjected to tantrums. But there you go I’d like to say i don’t know what i did to deserve all this pain and angst, but i do, and its every bit as bad as i ever imagined it would be. Sometimes i wonder if enduring it is actually worth it?

I’ve spent today mostly being a very successful home school mom and also managing to fix our internet connection, which is provided courtesy of people whose name might suggest they want people to communicate (twice) but don’t appear to have the means to facilitate that *growl* It first began to go wrong a while back, dropping intermittently in the evenings. I had the fortune to get through to someone within 500 miles of me, who helped me twiddle with some settings and fixed it. Unfortunately it has been getting worse and from about 3pm to midnight, we’ve not been able to do more than 3 clicks between us before it drops (literally, 3, that was all you got, if you were lucky.) So today i had to go through 90 minutes of palaver with people reading from set paragraphs, who insisted it was

a) because our bt extensions were probably old and faulty (2 year old house).

b) we had the wrong cable

c) we weren’t using our computer next to the main bt socket (which would involve having it in front of the front door)

d) we had our router connected to an extension cable and plugged in near other electrical devices (yuh huh, the COMPUTER!!!!)

e) maybe we had Sky or Freeview and that was affecting it, or maybe our neighbours did

f) we didn’t know how to put our computer togethyer properly

I was made to unplug it all, move things about, wait for calls back, switch on and off etc, all of which i had done, while they assured me nothing was wrong with my connection and it must be our hardware (oh, and i also have a faulty phone that will only ring out one time in 4 but the people on the other end can hear me, do i) because it definitely isn’t their fault (my hardware being so pissy that it only cuts out between 3pm and 12am you understand.

Eventually, i answered no to enough questions about flashing lights and was given a new number which i was “only allowed to use for the next 5 days” (!) which got me through to a person without a checklist. He, bless him, said “yeah, you are on a cruddy profile and you need to have some new ADSL settings” – we did that and in 5 minutes i had a connection back again.

Having no connection sure stymies a house like this these days… no one could do ANYTHING this morning!