And onwards to BT Infinity!

Don't get me  wrong, BT isn't a bad service and the speed of connection in this area is streets ahead of the competition, but..

I have spent too much of today, reviving a Thinkpad T40... this was because I rang the BT broadband helpdesk in Utter Pradesh (by name and by nature) to be asked to do all the things I had just done, in my underwear, in the cold last night, simply to play my games and read my regulars.  I mean, how much am I meant to suffer before I lose my latest Chess game.

So I'd turned the hub off, and the router, made myself a small libation, got the torch back out, replugged the stuff into their sockets in an artfully hidden corner of the room... several decads of minutes, having found the carefully filed number which doesn't simply route you through to a message telling you to go to wibbly-wobbly-woo and look it up on the interweb thingie. Just how am I supposed to do that when you fools at BT have poked my virtual eyes and ears out?

And I get through to the only human interface that BT still have. Some poor so and so even further into the night with a degree manning a help desk responding mostly to people who forget to plug their laptops in when their batteries run out. No wonder they sound tired, knackered and fed up... at 3 in the morning, watching the cockroaches run around the wiring in the basement of some sweatshop with 96 degrees of both humidity and temperature trying to speak patiently to some well-fed English idiot... and I am not overtelling this, their conditions are horrible...

But that's not my problem! I have a seige coming to completion on two cities and need to pull my troops if my attack isn't going well and this bozo is telling me to check stuff I've already checked, run tests I've already RUN AND I'M GETTING VERY ANGRY! So I tell him to hold the line, take more BP tablets and tell him I used to do his job, but now it's been outsourced to monkeys who get paid peanuts. I think my faux sympathy might earn me some consideration... in spite of the phone harpies recording the conversation and even though English is his second or third language, he hangs the phone up...

Well, I go swinging from one telephone menu to another until I reach the same call centre in Utter Pradesh... must be a quiet night... it's the same bloke! So I faux apologise and say that I've now done all he asked me to. And repeat it when he repeats back to me all the steps. Trouble is, now he remembers the phone harpies and is going to get me to do every. damned. step. and. tell. him. once. I've done that. I bite the inside of my cheek (eating the remains of pork scratchings, I tell him this so I get some of my own back). I get through all this...

Do you have a laptop Mr Chumbles. It's late, it's an unguarded moment. Now I have both and stupidly tell him this. He tells me I need to connect it to the hub with a lan cable. The laptop was last connected to the net in November 2012. It will take forever to boot up, update Widows*, update the AntiVenom software and recharge the battery sufficiently to do what he asks (5 hours to be precise - I've done this whilst writing my memoirs),

I give up. I go to bed. I know perfectly well it's a screw up at their end, I just want someone there to admit it. But every so often I wake up in the night and thank my lucky stars I am not an outsourced help desk guy in Utter Pradesh.

*Widows TM: the code name for Windows 9