My broadband connection has been playing up for the last couple of days, but thankfully it appears to have settled down now. It would just randomly stop working every couple of minutes and then magically come back again. The phone was crackling too, and sometimes the dial tone would disappear.

My experience with BT support wasn’t particularly helpful. I called them up, listened to their introductory spiel and then did an automatic test of the line. Hooray I thought - they test the line automatically, and log the fault for me. This did sort of happen. It identified a fault “within your house” and I got put into a queue to wait for an “adviser” which sounds like someone you talk to when you apply for a mortgage, but I digress. I waited 10 minutes and eventually got through.

The “adviser” cheerfully informed me that he couldn’t help me, but he knew exactly who could. So, I was transferred to their call centre in Calcutta. I spoke to a very polite and helpful woman for about an hour. But unfortunately, her accent was so strong that almost everything she said I needed to have repeated. This was compounded by the intermittent crackling on the line so that when she did say things that I would be able to understand, it was drowned out by the crackles. My frustration levels sky-rocketed. I was asked what type of broadband router I had, then to turn it off and back on again, undo all of the cables and plug them back in again, etc, all of which had me crawling around under the stairs getting filthy, with the phone perched painfully between my neck and head. I swear I must have looked like Quasimodo.

Next, she asked me to unscrew the BT plate from the wall and of course I hadn’t thought to bring a screwdriver to the phone - who would? So, she said she could give me a number to ring where they’d be able to help me. I bet you can guess what that number was, can’t you? Yup, it was the BT fault reporting number that I had rung originally. So back in a queue again to wait for an “adviser”. So I had to explain everything that had happened and they were most apologetic, checked on their system and told me that the fault had been identified as being in my house and I could either arrange for a BT engineer to visit, or not.

Great I thought, progress! Then I was informed that if either no fault could be found or if the fault was with my “equipment” then there was a £115 call-out charge and a further charge of £99 per hour of work. So hang on, I thought to myself. I have an intermittent problem. If the engineer arrives and it all works perfectly, I get landed with a bill for over £200 quid and the problem might still be there. And just at this moment, the phone crackled and went dead. And then 5 seconds later came back on again. I took this as a sign from beyond and arranged for the engineer. Then for the rest of the day and again this morning it’s been perfect. Not even a glitch and I’ve been streaming videos from youtube constantly. With panic levels rising at the thought of £200 for nothing I checked on BT’s website and saw that it’s 24 hours notice required to cancel the engineer, and it was now only 23. So I got straight on the phone, entered the queue for an adviser and managed to get it cancelled. And word for word, this is what the man said: “Good thing you told us, you’d have been charged for the call-out if we couldn’t find a problem”.

So, I think we can call this a learning experience. If the intermittent problem comes back, I will try and find some local, cheap, freelance telephony engineer, phone them up from my mobile and say “can you please come have a look” and that will hopefully be it.

The picture is Dan saying “Please throw the ball for me again, Tom”! It seemed appropriate, somehow!

Cheers, Tom.