-off line –

Off-line for a week! One whole week.

We’d been with our server for about twenty years, but now its prices are going sky-high.
We’d found a package elsewhere, that cost a third of the price; and so being at the end of one contract took our thirty-days’ leave notice.

Ours is an inclusive package: internet, TV, and landline.

So, their Sales Team got in touch and dangled cheaper packages for us. I said Send us the details.
They didn’t, but being Sales people took that as a Yes, and so cancelled our leave and signed us on for another eighteen months.
Didn’t tell us.
We happened to look at our billing page, and found the contract.

So we had to ring them. It took about three hours of waiting, and then increasingly confusing conversations. A lot of their customers it appears, were also trying to cancel, or re-negotiate. We were trapped in that queue.

And so we restated our leaving commitment: thirty days. Yes we were already set up with another provider.

And they did it again, cancelled our leaving and put us on another contract.
We rang again, We did not authorise this. Someone in your company is deciding for us. That is illegal.

And they did it again.
We rang again. Your details with us are very confused, they said.
Purposely so, we thought.
– Look through it, at no point do we ever say to another contract. Thirty days, we said, Then phht.
We’ve got you down for for leaving on 10^thof March. 
– No, 23red of February.
We can do 25^th.
– OK, ok. You get the impression: frazzled, stressed. That’s what they wanted, so they could string us out further, agree (You have to say a robust No to the Sales team, they said. So everything but a robust No, is a Yes?).

The message boards for this company have plenty more stories very similar to this.

The day before switch off, we checked the billing page, and… they’d done it again!
We rang again.
Next day they Did switch us off.

And so our new provider said, You need a line putting in. 
– Your van has been round, checked availability, posted us a letter by hand.
The engineer put us a line in the same day as out switch off.

– Nothing follows through, does it! –

Router? We asked. Your site says Same day online.

Because you’ve not had a line for a long time, we have to check viability.
They did.

The router’ll be with you tomorrow, only… we can’t set up your package until Friday. And then it’ll need time to get up to speed.
– How long?
A few weeks, possibly a month. 
– A month?
You’ll be able to use basic functions before then, of course.

It was overnight.

Apart from the fall-out of stress from the leave-farrago, and the sign-on-to-the-new charade I have to admit it has been very peaceful without it.
We’ve been able to catch up with reading, and, what’s more surprising and something we don’t realise we have lost: time to Think.

How much of the day is wasted frittering and flitting about online and getting almost nothing back from doing it.

Then Crash! into the craziness of the Ukraine situation. To process what most other people have already had to confront and process. 

The first call on out new landline? A phone-scam centre.
Oh, and the label sent for us to return the equipment to the old provider, does not scan at the designated hub, nor does it accept the alphanumerical provided.

But this new provider, a smaller company, does seem to be commendable.