On Friday (the 13th) my broadband was running exceptionally slow. About 5 minutes to load one page. After pinging my local network, and sites on the web it took me about five minutes to work out the problem was with the ADSL hub at my serving exchange. I was getting load of errors and packet retransmits.


I have a laptop, a desktop and a Wi-Fi phone that cannot access the internet. Is it the PC …no. Even the dog agrees.

I rang the so called ‘help line’ to try and report the problem with my broadband. After about 5 minutes working through the menus I eventually got a ‘you are in a queue, please wait’, after another long while I spoke to a guy in Bangalore. He was absolutely determined to run right through his script, possibly twice, but very very slowly. He seemed to know less than my dog about broadband. After an hour of doing useless things like deleting my browsing history, cookies, remembered passwords, checking I was not on dial up etc. I even shouted at him, ‘I am an ex telecom engineer, I just want you to raise a fault for the diagnostics people to investigate’…He just totally ignored this. At this point I kind of lost the will to live and abandoned him.

Next day the broadband was ok.

I just love Fridays.