Speechless Again

I must apologise for my recent absence from the web and the lack of updates both here and at The Sleaze, but I'm afraid that, thanks to British Telecom (BT), I've been without either a telephone or broadband since Friday. According to BT it was due to 'a fault at the exchange' and that they had no intention of doing anything about it until Monday! However, when I returned home from visiting my mother this evening, I found that my line had mysteriously been reconnected. Of course, there was no fault at the exchange - I know from bitter experience that this is simply BT's catch-all excuse for outages. Line faults originating at the exchange rarely disconnect lines completely and rarely only affect a single line. I suspect the truth was a cock up in which someone decided to disconnect me, despite the fact that my bill is paid up to date. Obviously, they aren't going to admit to a mistake and will doubtless claim that my early reconnection is testament to their efficiency. Bollocks!

Still, this reconnection at least means that I won't have to spend most of tomorrow in a public call box chasing them up and threatening legal action if they didn't reconnect me. Again, bitter experience has taught me that this is usually the only way to get results from BT. Dealing with their so-called 'customer services' is a trial - they are so utterly contemptuous of their customers it's frightening. Anyway, barring further outages, normal service will be resumed next week, although I'm now well behind schedule in writing the first story for Issue 51 of The Sleaze. Consequently, Sleaze Diary might have to take a back seat for a while. All-in-all, the problems of this weekend really were something I could have done without. BT really are utter bastards!