Return of The Hole

Two years ago a hole appeared in the road surface near the house. It was patched, but then collapsed into a bigger hole, which was excavated properly to investigate, then filled in and a two metre square area of street was re-surfaced. This past week, at one corner of the patched area, another small hole, big enough to contain a football has appeared, so Clare rang the non-emergency service contact number to report it. First she had to overcome her surprise in discovering that the service now operates via the South Wales Police switchboard which puts callers in touch with the relevant Council depertment. I wonder how long it will take to get done?

Talking of holes, since we moved into Meadow Street three years ago, Orange mobile phone signal reception has never been good. It's barely adequate in the attic, and it's just about possible to receive, although not to send texts from indoors downstairs, nor make or receive a call without the line hanging up after seconds. Usually we have to go out into the front porch to make or receive a call. We concluded we were in a reception black hole and that was that. When I acquired a Blackberry for use in the CBS work, we found reception on the BT network generally good enough for the phone to function normally. It should be, after all because we can see the BT tower from the attic window. I still don't enjoy using the Blackberry, but love the fact that it 'just works'.

This week, and not for the first time, the Orange, sorry EE it's now called, service was out for several hours at a time, even when we walked down the street to look for better reception. Annoyed, I tweeted about the fact that on times Everything Everywhere = Nothing Nowhere. I noticed that someone else had tweeted about the EE 3G transmittor being down and to switch to 2G reception only. It seems that others locally, and in other parts of the country are having similar problem, judging by the complaints appearing on Twitter. It doesn't sit well with EE boasting about the fastest 4G service. Consistency and reliability are more important than speed to ordinary users.