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I painted the the front garden wall coping stone, the porch and its surrounds yesterday. There's only the bay window to do a second time now and the job is complete. A fledgling seagull from one of the street chimney nests is roaming the street while its parents patrol often noisily above. Some years they die, other years they grow until they can fly, and the street goes quiet again, until next breeding season.

My complaints on Twitter about poor EE reception locally in Pontcanna have elicited a response from someone who manages their on-line public relations, via the Twitter instant messaging channel. I was at first suspicious of someone asking for my name and mobile number, as my name is published on Twitter, and my Gmail address available for them to send me an email also, so there was an amusing exchange of banter about this punctuating the routine. It seems as if work is being done on the relay system in the local cell of the network. Whether improvement will mean eventual improvement of reception remains to be seen. It's always been poor in the houses around here, no matter how good the advertised service is meant to be.

In this hot weather, the relay linking our office monitoring system with that down County Hall has briefly and confusingly done down a couple of times. Normally this is very robust, but feeling microscopic changes in alignment of the dishes, or changes in atmospheric conditions near ground level are capable of interrupting the flow, requiring system re-starts. Just like with the mobile phone. The helpline mantra for people having trouble with their reception is: "First try switching it off and on again." Heaven preserve us all from solar flares, as they too can have a much more disruptive impact on networks.

Not long after finally touching base with EE's eager to help people, I had a text message asking me to participate in a cost-free survey about the quality of service received from the help people. Here's a record of the exchange. I couldn't resist a bit of childish mischief.

RX: "Thank you for using Orange Internet Service on your phone. We'll text you shortly for some feedback about your experience (All texts are free) How likely are you to recommend us based on your experiences of using the internet on your phone recently? From 0 (Not at all) to 10 (Extremely).

TX: Internet for me is best a big screen experience. Emergency use only on a phone, as too hard to read with old eyes.

RX: Sorry, your answer needs to be between 0-10 How likely are you to recommend us based on your experiences of using the internet on your phone recently?

TX: I don't do robot polls, so stop harassing me.


RX: Sorry, your answer needs to be between 0-10 How likely are you to recommend us based on your experiences of using the internet on your phone recently?

The rubric assumes everybody knows you can only enter numbers. The robot survey monkey doesn't instruct you to. Duh! Bad design.

Earlier I'd asked the EE help line people for reassurance that I wouldn't get spam texts. This was what I got. So I complained:

TX: How come the robotic survey monkey is suddenly in touch with my phone? I only talk to humans. Sometimes.

To which I got the reply 

RX: Hi Keith, most of us here are humans, we are not able to catch the robot monkey though!

So nice to know there are humans out there not just some geek's idea of artificial intelligence to solve all our problems. Humans do stupid things, but remain smarter than machines whenever they stop, observe, and reason clearly with facts rather than suppositions, and talk to you in language you can grasp.


Enough hassle for one week, I thought, doing their best with all this technology which is never as good as we think it ought to be - although my sister June complains that it was better once upon a time, but improvements (we are talking Google stuff here) are making it impossible, as there's new things to learn and get used to when the old stuff worked just fine.