A business blame game

Another damp overcast day, but a fair night's sleep. After breakfast I recorded next Wednesday's Morning Prayer. The Biblical Reflection on an apocalyptic text from Matthew's Gospel was challenging to write, rather glum for Epiphanytide. Although my focus was reasonably sharp, I stumbled several times when reading the text. Editing took longer than usual. A recording made of half a dozen sound files, was tricky to piece together due to attention lapses. Although I woke up with a clear head, brain fog crept in. I recall feeling like this before as dehydration started affecting me, so I drank a few glasses of water and it helped me to concentrate and finish the job. 

In the morning's mail was another equipment delivery return mailbag from TalkTalk, which I'd not asked for and had no need of, as I returned their kit earlier in the week. I went out for a breath of fresh air and took the letter wrote last night around to the GP surgery. Clare had started cooking lunch by the time I returned home. After eating a spent an hour contacting TalkTalk via Direct Messaging to complain about the phone number not being switched over as requested, and the appearance of the equipment return bag. It was a frustrating exchange with TalkTalk blaming BT and BT blaming Talktalk for not reinstating our home phone number. The delay continues, and the work won't be completed until after the weekend. All I got was confirmation that the account closure process began on 7th January when our BT broadband service went live. No admission of responsibility for the twelve day delay in reinstating our existing home phone number, and dismissal of my compensation claim for lack of service. I think this is a story worth telling to the BBC's 'You and Yours' programme. Assembling all the pieces of evidence and transcribing the Direct Messaging thread will not be easy. Ashley says that telecoms companies deliberately make it difficult to change service providor. Will it prove worth the effort? I'm not sure. 

Coed Organics is no longer supplying us with a weekly organic veggie bag and we have to remember to stock up to avoid running out before the weekend. The sun was setting by the time I went out to buy veggies and walk in the park.

While writing after supper I had a text message from TalkTalk acknowledging my complaint and referring this to the dispute resolution team. The fact that TalkTalk considers a complaint a dispute presumes an adversarial stance on its behalf. So much for customer concern and quality of service. The company excels at damaging its reputation and wears down those with serious issues to resolve until they give up trying.

I spent the evening after supper writing a homily for the Eucharist I've been asked to offer at St Catherine's the Wednesday after next. Curiously, enough I found this exercise quite  refreshing. I may sleep well tonight.

Phone switch botch

Overcast with non stop rain through the day and into the night. It's snowing inland, but not cold enough near the coast. Nearly ten hours in bed, three hours awake. A fair night's sleep according to Fitbit. Not fair enough. I drank lots of water and ate a good breakfast, but felt thick headed all day.

The Crans-Montana bar managers are being charged in the aftermath of the fire which killed forty and injured 116. It's taken a week to identify all the victims, many were badly burned. There had been no safety inspections for the past five years. It sounds as if municipal building safety officials were asleep on the job or short sighted in their scrutiny. The use of flammable sound insulation materials and wood struts in the roof space was a disaster waiting to happen. Multiple failures to ensure public safety.

An OpenReach engineer arrived at eleven, checked the connections and the router I installed yesterday. All is working as intended. He exhorted us not to switch off the system at night as this can cause problems that report anomalies where none exist, but we can switch off the wifi mesh extension. Our cordless phone hub is now connected to the network through the router rather than the copper landline wall socket. He succeeded in tidying up the collection network and power cables and making a neat bunch out of them so we can buy a flexible wire spiral to wrap around the bunch and keep them tidy together. 

After his visit I contacted TalkTalk to request an equipment mailbag returning their router by mail. It took me twenty minutes using a direct messaging bot to achieve this. It could have been done in a few minutes speaking to a live human being directly, but employing real intelligent people to speak to directly is more expensive than a digital device. It may achieve the same result, but message and order processing wastes the client's time, not that of the business.

Clare bought bitter Seville oranges yesterday and started making this year's batch of marmalade after breakfast, and baking a batch of bread at the same time. Marvellous multi tasking! After a snack lunch, Rachel and I made music together. Sadly my hazy head and slow brain made my playing error prone. We went out in the rain to do some shopping. When we arrived at Beanfreaks, Clare had a phone call from our cleaner Jorja. We'd forgotten she was coming due to the disruption of the day. I only went out for fresh air and could have stayed home to welcome her. I returned home immediately to let her in and get dry.  My brolly is even more broken than it was before due to gusts of wind seizing it like a sail and bending stays until it's hard to close. What a horrible wet day.

On checking my emails, there was one from BT informing me of a new phone number, even though I had informed BT following their SMS to me a fortnight ago about keeping the existing landline number. I had to use their SMS help line and exchange messages with a 'bot' to explain what had happened and reach a live human being a quarter of an hour later to explain what had not happened. I now have to wait three to five days for our landline number to be reinstated. This may be due to TalkTalk not relinquishing control of the landline, or seasonal delay. It means that if the GP or hospital or any family or friends were to contact us on the landline number they couldn't get through. Most would use a mobile number for either of us instead - if they had it on record, but exceptions have the potential to cause trouble in the event of a crisis. It's annoying and unsettling.

Rachel cooked spicy vegetables to go with sea bass for our supper. Then she and I went out for a walk in the dark. The air temperature dropped and a gusty wind drove rain into us and soakee our top clothes. It was too unpleasant to walk far. I took refuge in writing a Reflection on the parable of the vineyard for next Wednesday' Motning Prayer instead and went to bed early again. 

Getting started with BT broadband

Cloudy again for much of the day but a bit warmer. I woke up early and posted today's Morning Prayer YouTube link to WhatsApp. Another disturbed night's sleep gave me a foggy head. It took me a long time to get started. BT bombarded me with email and text messages reporting on today's broadband activation. 

I got in a muddle about an OpenReach engineer installation visit, unsure if it was meant to happen today or tomorrow. I tried to confirm this visit by logging in to the BT app without success. I needed to have a phone signal and be attached to wi-fi for this, but at this stage I wasn't yet on on-line. I had to unpack the router and connect the cables, and power it up. When I did there was no sign of life to start with. It was slower to  start than I expected. The initial power-on self test ran a diagnostic check on the connection before the router would receive and send signals. Panic over. Then the chore of adding the new router's long password to various internet devices so they are ready to use when needed, rather than doing it in haste when I need to use them in a hurry

Kath returned home to Kenilworth after breakfast. Rachel investigated coach bookings for her return trip to Heathrow for the return flight to Arizona. We have had wonderful quality family time with all three children at home with us this Christmastide. They must all go their separate ways and live their own lives. but it breaks my heart to part company, conscious that in my condition I may not live to see them all together again in the flesh. They get on so well together, and show us such loving kindness and care.

Rachel us cooked an unusual veggie curry for lunch using fennel, red pepper and chick peas. After we'd eaten, I walked to Parkwood clinic for an acupuncture treatment and did a circuit of Llandaff Fields at sunset on my way home.

More music making with Rachel after supper, then early to bed in an endeavour to shake off persistent tiredness. 

More on connectivity

Monday afternoon, I went into town, and hunted for a new office PC, in John Lewis and PC world, but didn't find what I was looking for. All in One HP desktops with touch screens are now retail flavour of the month. We don't need the touch interface for work purposes. An hour in the office re-examining the Cloud file sync problem, revealed that as long as you log in with proper MS Account details every time rather than an alias username and password, there's no problem. When Windows Update requires a system re-start, logging in with an alias won't deliver synchronisation. There's no warning. Get into the habit of accessing using an alias, your files get saved on your machine and local network, but not in the Cloud. It's obvious, but not obvious. There are so many useless bells and whistles to annoy Windows users, but a helpfully placed notification here would lower resentment and blood pressure levels.

Tuesday, I was going to extend my hunt for a new office PC, but as I was about to leave, Mary, our neighbour came over and asked if I could come and check her PC, as something was stopping her from accessing her emails, and she thought she'd done something wrong. She has an old slowish XP machine and was exercise by the thought of having inadvertently disconnected it from the router, but wasn't sure how to check this. Physically it was fine. The error messages were all of the 'network not found' type, and compounded by a confusing browser install of AVG 'Safe Search', which detracted from the simple browser set up she was used to. The problem didn't show immediately until I re-booted the router. No broadband. After Clare joined us for a cup of tea, the red light on the router had turned blue again, and all was back to normal. Back at home, I learned about an inexplicable spate of BT broadband outages across the country during the day. Not linked to any cyber attack. Is the weather, sunspots or what?

Earlier in the day I spent a couple of hours thinking about doing another daily Lenten blog. Last year's was quite demanding to sustain but worth the bible study and mental exercise it entailed. This time, I'd like to write about the venture of prayer, especially bearing in mind that I'm currently working with a newly baptized Christian convert. He is coming to Lenten activity afresh, a first time experience, both of prayer and participation in Liturgy. I have to keep Hamid in mind as I write, even if his English is far from adequate to understand what I write. On a one to one basis ideas can be communicated more simply than they can in writing.

I enjoyed my double class of Chi Gung and Tai Chi this evening, and wasn't nearly as tired at the end of it. So much so, that I set up a new blog page and wrote for an hour, in readiness for the weeks to come.
     

Business on the move

We were relieved to hear Rachel and Jasmine had arrived safely after the ten hour flight back to Phoenix. Jasmine woke up in the afternoon and went for the briefest of introductory visits to her new school, then back home for more rest. Rachel did some house hunting, in preparation for her move into the city from deepest rural Cottonwood. It'll be great when we know they are settled in their new situation.

Meanwhile, there's a CBS office move to prepare for at the end of the week. Monday and Tuesday afternoons were taken up planning how we can keep working without interrupting the first key task of the year, mailing a hundred or so invoices out to the first batch of signed up radio users. For me it meant preparing the mail-merge data and getting it to run properly, so that Julie has an editable file to work on when she arrives on Thursday. Inevitably I hit snags, and opted to complete the chore at home. With all the admin PCs are configured to synchronise with Microsoft Skydrive, I can put its usability to the test, when Julie comes to work this Thursday on the invoice file generated. 

This  lunchtime I had a funeral at Thornhill. There was a familiar face among the mourners who greeted me cordially after the service. It took a moment for me to recognise Fr Roger Balkwill, who was assistant Curate in Caerphilly the same time as me, forty five years ago. The deceased was his brother-in-law. We've met no more than twice in the years since then. USPG sent him to work in mission in Zimbabwe after his curacy, and when he returned, he went to work in the West Midlands, which was where we next met, twenty years later. Co-incidentally, the last time we met was nearly two years ago, at the funeral of priest who was a contemporary of ours.

Afterwards, I collected Owain from home and we visited PC World together to buy yet another computer for the office. The next CBS move will be our seventh. It will place us in a building where we don't have the 24/7 access we need, so we're arranging a hire a room for a night support base in our present location, where we do have 24/7 access, and that means we need to create a clone of our radio monitoring and recording system, a necessity for continued operation. An extra PC is needed for this.

 The decision to buy a Lenovo 23" all in one machine took five minutes, the purchase took the best part of an hour on top of this, so eventually we got back to the office and Owain got Windows 8 installed and updated, updating being necessary before it was possible to upgrade to 8.1, which is why it all takes so long. NOT a selling point in the business world where time is money! Even so, it took just over half the time it took me with each of the other two PCs I've dealt with this past two weeks, a testimony to the faster BT Broadband we have in the office compared with our very flaky TalkTalk home broadband. Even as I write this, not many minutes pass without getting an auto-save error message, and most nights the signal drops irretrievably and no even a router re-boot will fix it.

With Owain working on PC commissioning, I was free to help pack stuff into the huge removers' crates delivered to our end of the office, and to pack away as much electronic gear as we can do without for the next couple of days.  It felt as if we were making little impression on the task in hand, since our admin area also doubles up as a radio workshop and is rarely tidy, but by the end of the afternoon, most of the cabinets and cupboard were empty and ready for the removers to take. We're looking forward to having extra space with our new arrangements, and hopefully that'll bring more order and calm to our work-space.
   

The illusion that speed means progress

Easter Monday we all rose late. It's quite a while since I last slept ten hours. We didn't do much or go far, as it was still cold and dull. Irritatingly, the internet was intermittently on and off all day, and for the most part slower than usual. Not that unusual with TalkTalk Broadband however. Most nights we're without a reliable connection from nine thirty for two hours.

Easter Tuesday, rising late again. Mary from across the road came over to ask for help with her computer, as she was getting error messages she didn't recognise. It turned out that her internet connection was also very slow and intermittent, making the job of updating an old XP driven computer into a series of long freezes. Now Mary is a BT customer. I've checked all my equipment, connected to TalkTalk broadband, and the problem's the same. This suggests there's an infrastructure problem somewhere not too far away and it's affecting service providors who buy their slice of the information highway from BT Openreach.

My router shows I am connected, the operating systems on various computers in the house show that my  data is being sent out but only a tiny fragment of data is returning, not enough to display a website, only enough to make the browser hang. Then after a while the router displays 'unable to connect to internet' and drops out for several minutes before resuming at a speed too slow to be functional.

Nothing about local outages on the news. Nothing about it on the TalkTalk website - no point in phoning them as their customer service is rarely of any use at the time you need it. Oh yes, the way I know this is because my BT 3G wireless internet dongle still works, enabling me to visit websites and post this. It's lucky I have no urgent need to spend lots of time on-line at the moment. 

I wonder how many people in business, or managing emergencies are wondering what on earth is happening. It makes me realise how dangerously dependent we've become on internet connectivity over the past decade, and just how wicked it is that internet service marketing promotes an illusion of a world in which every service runs perfectly, consistently and powerfully, when in reality it's still a work in progress whose reliability falls far short of being comparable with that of the national electricity grid.

The Big Joke is all the promotional hype Cardiff is getting to do with the roll out of super-fast broadband services intended to improve economic development. What's most needed is consistency and reliability at whatever speed. Without that your plans always unravel and your emergencies are un-manageable.

What are we doing by lying to ourselves about priorities?