Kates Journal

This story is everything that Alaska brings forth in my mind. It’s so insane, it could only happen there.

Now, in other news, yesterday I was ranty at BT, today they’ve worn me down. Maybe because I’m sick, or maybe just through their utter crappitude. Having told me in phonecall 5, or 4, I’m unsure which, that there was a fault ‘either with my broadband hub phone or with the router’ and asked me to perform a check and ring them back at which point they’d organise a replacement for whichever it is…

They – after I rung them back – declared that they wouldn’t send out a replacement because the fault I’ve got is “similar” to an outage they’ve been having recently. Never mind that my fault appears to predate their outage, never mind that their outage only affects people 5 to 15 minutes into the call (mine will randomly occur from the second I answer, to any point onwards). No. It *might* be that, so it’s okay to incovenience a customer who *may* have a piece of equipment that has not worked since day one. That’s fine.

However, in an astonishing feat of persistance versus BT they have now said they’ll send me out a new homehub. I wonder if it’ll be any better than the one I’ve currently got.

Incidentally, in case it’s not, who do people recommend for ADSL in the UK?

I dunno why, I’ve had a fairly relaxed ‘while’, but the last few days I’ve been feeling a bit iffy. Not really unwell but I had a headache which sucked, and then I had this sort of nausea. Not all the time, but just sometimes. It’d been hanging around for a while at any rate. Last night I couldn’t sleep, at leasts, i could, but only in short bursts; I kept waking up and feeling hot, then cold. At 4am I woke up drenched in sweat, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I felt incredibly hot, despite having the window open. So, having downed some more paracetamol and brufen I finally located my ancient little mercury thermometer.

39.4 Degrees C.

No wonder I was feeling unwell.

So, day off then today. I hated ringing at 4am to say “I’m not coming in” but since standing was a challenge, I don’t think a day of work would have been a great plan. I still feel terrible – which means I’ll be missing the Metric gig tonight :(

Anyone want a ticket to go see Metric?

So, lots of web browsing and sleeping later, I bring you some good news, and something interesting.

So, I just had the misfortune to experience BT’s customer ’support’. Having patronised me for 30 minutes, the guy cut me off mid sentance. Well, I’m impressed.

Problems with my homehub:

- Loss of DNS. I suddenly become unable to resolve addresses, this only ceases to be an issue if I reset the homehub.
- Random disconnection for wireless computers. Despite indicating high signal strength both wireless machines for longish periods can’t access the hub… unless I reset it.
- Random inability to connect to the homehub admin interface. Usually this is followed by one of the other issues.
- Wireless machine (a) maintains a 54ish Mbps connection, wireless machine (b) does not. It drops to 1Mbps then falls off.

BT’s response? There’s nothing wrong with it. Clearly this is the way it’s *meant* to work.

BT’s response to the fact that my homehub phone has a marked tendancy to mid-call emit a high-pitched whistle and then crash, well, I’m not sure. They said it was another department, and then cut me off so I’m disinclined to go back and talk to them again. I’m strongly inclined to cancel my subscription and demand my money back.

I can’t describe the pain.

In other news, I watched the Lost Room today. Um, all of it. Not intentionally; it’s just it was there, and I was tired. To be honest, my inital thoughts weren’t great – the acting was just a bit… meh. And I was frustrated by some of the plot devices used. But, I got into all the same, the story is kinda good enough that if you just let some odds and sods slide you become engrossed.

And err, yeah, hence I appear to have spent 6 hours watching TV today, which was kind of unintentional. It’s definately good, definately worth watching… yes. So um, yeah. No decorating today though – which is bad of me. I should have been decorating. Definately. Feh. Either that or doing a minor reorg of some bits in the lounge. I think I want to shuffle a few things around.

Or hoovering. The tasks are there, I’m just not really doing them. Feh. Work’s been hard though, recently. I’ve got a patient who thinks, to quote the song, ‘everything you know is wrong’. Combined with everything you do is wrong, and also everything is late. The eventual effect on me, after several days of this, is to just not want to walk into the bay.

We’ve given the ‘common courtesy’ lecture, the ‘not the only patient’ lecture, the ‘please is part of being polite’ lecture, and the ’shouting at staff is not acceptable’ lecture. All of which rained down like a drizzle over the ocean.

So my day off tomorrow is much appreciated and I have plans, plans that mean I should probably go to bed…

I) I’d forgotten how much nicer the Macinhac is to use. I’d forgotten how shiny MacOS is (anyone want to buy me a Mac Laptop? Anyone? No? *tumbleweed*). I’d forgotten how much nicer the display is. I’d also forgotten how slow the screen update is on the Macinhac (anyone want to buy me a big, powerful video editing Mac? Anyone? No? Darn).

II) I’ve discovered how utterly awful the ringtones on the BT Homehub are. It’d been bugging me for a while that the ringtone on the phone was irritating, but I’d not realised that it doesn’t have the simplest, most basic ring tone of them all. ‘Ring ring’, or even a US/Canadian stye Riiiiiing. No, it’s got irritating polyphonic ringtones that sound awful. *sighs*

III) And finally, I’d forgotten that I got tagged by nagrom523 to do the ten random things meme. And believe me, it’s 2229 here, and I’m feeling pretty random just before bed. So here goes… Read the rest of this entry »