If a thing ain't broke...

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front for the last few days, mainly because British Telecom has been doing its best to screw up my internet connection. I have been quite happy with the service that they have provided up till now, but for months they have been badgering me to get something called a BT Home Hub. This is a trendy white box that doesn't just act as a router-modem, it also has an internet phone attached and gives you access to lots of other wonderful "services" (or so they say). I had resisted their approaches because I thought there was a potential for creating problems where none currently existed. Last week I finally gave in and agreed to "upgrade" my system.

The trendy white box with its dinky white internet phone arrived on Thursday. The documentation was comprehensive, but I phoned up to check that I didn't need to uninstall my existing hardware before connecting up my wonderful new hub. I was told by a nice lady that this was not necessary. I unplugged a perfectly functioning old system and plugged in the new system to find that it detected no broadband service at all. Despite, literally, hours on the phone to the helpline, and numerous bizarre manoeuvres the f---ing device is still not working. We even had it sitting between 6 pm last night and 6 am today supposedly updating itself. This involved all of the lights on the front of the thing flashing in an extremely irritating way. At 6.05 am I finally pulled the plug on the annoying little piece of junk, reconnected my low tech old broadband router modem and, fortunately, resumed flawless surfing.

The extremely polite, pathologically cheerful BT technician is due to phone me (from India, I suspect) at 4.30 pm today to see how things have gone.

In my extremely impolite, pathologically morose way, I'll be telling him, in fairly detailed anatomical terms, where he can stuff his BT Home Hub.