Counting Beans

So you might be wondering where have all my blog entries of late been. Well, let me tell you. The local telephone provider here in SA, Telkom, has decided that its high time that my ADSL line experiences some significant problems. So almost every evening upon returning from home I am met with the site of my ADSL signal disappearing every 2 minutes. Now as you may very well imagine, this provides a significant problem to me when I try to go on the world wide web.

Compounding the matter is the fact that the support centre for Telkom is based in one of the seven levels of Hell Dante wrote of.  When trying to contact them you should ensure that you at least use a speaker phone so that you can get on with something else as you endure the 45 minute waiting period to get hold of a human voice.  During those 45 minutes you’ll be subjected to a form of torture as you are forced to listen to a constant looping music track with a woman constantly telling you that your call IS important and that you should hold on.  She always sounds a bit hopeful that your call will be answered in a mere matter of seconds even after her voice comes on for the hundredth time.  If you manage to survive the long and arduous wait then you are usually greeted by a human that sounds even more depressed than you and who will rattle off a series of irrelevant questions and try to get you off the phone as soon as possible.

My ADSL signal loss should be a simple matter of getting a technician to look at the line you’d think, but oh no, Telkom has other ideas.  After getting them to promise me they’d monitor my line I never heard back from them.  This is after they told me that clearly the problem lies with my ISP even though they have nothing whatsoever to do with my ADSL line.  Then the second time I phoned they opened a fault report for my problem, only to SMS me afterwards stating clearly that they were monitoring a different phone line to the one I’d reported the fault for.  After phoning them to query this I was told that I would have to go through the whole reporting process again!  And just yesterday they phoned me for the first time to ask me if the problem was gone yet.  This really does give new meaning to the term “positive thinking”.

So fingers crossed that somehow I can get my phone line fixed before the long weekend hits.  The only saving grace is that GTA4 hits stores this week so I’ll have plenty of gaming to keep me occupied in the absence of internet