Sunday, March 30, 2025
I got home yesterday after watching the eclipse, put the kettle on and opened up my laptop. No internet. Well that's annoying, I thought.
My BT Hub was displaying the dreaded red ring of doom, a bit like an eclipse in itself, and rebooting it didn't help. OK that's more annoying, I thought.
I hoped it would sort itself out because it usually does on the rare occasions it ever happens. I gave it an hour but no, the red ring remained. Annoying!
I gave BT a call to see what was up and they sent me a text message which led to a website, because that beats employing people. We're aware of a fault, they said, which was annoying.
We're working on fixing it, they added, which was somewhat reassuring. But then I saw the "estimated fix time" and clocked that it was Tuesday evening. Annoying doesn't even cover it.
Not Saturday evening or Sunday evening or Monday evening but Tuesday evening! It might be an overestimate of course, but they were suggesting I faced three whole days without the internet, so you can imagine my annoyance.
My laptop was suddenly an isolated computer like it was 1995 or something. Also I could no longer do any streaming, so my TV options were live only or anything I'd recorded, ditto 1995. I turned the radio on and read the paper again, somewhat annoyed.
I could of course take my laptop to a cafe and use their wi-fi, but that's not especially realistic on a Saturday evening. Usually I try piggybacking on a neighbour's wi-fi but those are all secure connections these days so annoyingly that no longer works.
They switched my landline to 'Digital Voice' a while ago so that's gone down too. I do at least have a smartphone which'll keep me connected and online and everything, but it's not the same as a laptop, it's annoyingly inefficient.
In particular a smartphone may be good for accessing written content but it's hopeless for generating 1000 words of thoughtful comment with links and photos. Little tippy tappy screen, no decent keyboard shortcuts. You would not believe how long it's taken me just to write this much - it's been frustratingly annoying.
So you're not getting a proper blogpost today, nor probably tomorrow, nor likely again until BT fix whatever's wrong. Sorry, I had today's post all planned but it'd be far too complicated to actually write so all you're getting is this annoying apology.
I hope normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. I'll probably come back later and fill this gap in with the missing post, hopefully. In the meantime I'm rediscovering all the things I can still do without the internet, and you can go away and do something else too.
Don't be annoyed. You all lost an hour overnight what with the clocks going forward, so if nothing else I've just saved you five minutes.
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