Well, that went well...

I wonder if a local gov for southern Britain would work – since the Scots etc have one.

Snarky people might say they already have one, it’s called Westminster.

[even snarkier people might point out that it seems unaware that the north exists, never mind Scotland/Wales/NI]

I have an appointment with the Orange tech today, between 1pm and 6pm.

Quarter to four, still waiting…

it’s called Westminster.

Not always, it’s not. I’m not sure all the things I’ve heard it called are repeatable.

Quarter to four, still waiting…

Good luck!

Are you awaiting a Phone call or a visit?

Visit. Already tried the phone call route.

I’m not hopeful.

I called customer service just now, and the guy there made the usual excuses, doesn’t know why the rendezvous was not respected. I pressed him for why there was no communication, no update, nothing. He had nothing other than the usual platitudes.

He says he is going to call me on Monday (he said after 4pm, I kept telling him after 5.30pm because I work) to see if the problem has been resolved. Well, not unless the tech manages to come out:

• In the next fifteen minutes
• On Sunday
• On Monday and somehow do the tests while I’m not here

You know, if the tech came out and I wasn’t present, they’d bill me a €69 call out charge. Do I get to bill them the same? I mean, it’s not as if I didn’t have things to do today…

I kept telling him that I’m present chez moi after 17h30. I’ve wasted today, I’m sure as hell not taking a paid holiday day because of their lack of competence. We had a fixed rendezvous, they didn’t keep it.

Fifteen minutes to go…

I wasn’t present, they’d bill me a €69 call out charge. Do I get to bill them the same?

I always feel it should be reciprocal, seems only fair, i mean, it’s not as if they can’t send someone else, cancel, rearrange, keep working until their job list is complete.

So a guy came out to unblock the drain around back.

I’ve been posting videos of this omnishambles to YouTube.

So I went and looked today after emptying the bath and the pipe is completely blocked again.
I had a go with my pressure washer, but no use, it’s stuck.

So I called the company who did the work and the guy called me back. He is claiming that the guarantee is for him to come out and pass his pressure washer to try to unblock it, but he thinks it’ll keep happening and that I need to have the truck come out…at my expense.
I pointed out that I paid nearly a month’s salary to have the pipe unlocked, which fundamentally has not happened. So I paid for what? I don’t care how the pipe gets unblocked, just that I’m not paying extra.
It was left with him that he is to send me a quotation for the truck coming out (I think he said €2K!) and I will seek legal advice.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m very seriously pissed off at spending that kind of money for essentially nothing.

As such, I have made a report on the government website https://signal.conso.gouv.fr/ and explained what happened (including how his non-respect of the original appointment caused the prices to double, something he made no mention of) and asked for a peaceful resolution of either an unblocked pipe by whatever means or to be reimbursed so I can find somebody else to do it.

Also worth noting that the RCS (company code) identifies a company called Ibrahim Mangassouba at a completely different address (something I pointed out in my report).

Though, I rather suspect it’ll be me doing the unblocking as I think these sorts of legal things can take ages and rain water will not drain. I have ordered some rods and a claw like thing from Amazon, be here by the end of the week.

But, hey, I have a piece of paper that says “dégorgement” and that was not done (or, rather, it was done in such a half-arsed way that it didn’t even last beyond the weekend). I paid €760 for that (plus €360 for his work), so I fully expect the pipe to be unclogged and rainwater to pass.

As it is now, any prolonged rain/thunderstorm will risk flooding into the cave, as it is just not draining. You know, what I paid an arm and a leg for.

Let’s see what happens next…

All I can say is… Good Luck Mate! I suspect your Amazon bits will do the job just fine; I hope so.

I have just contacted UFC-QueChoisir. It’s a bit like Which? magazine crossed with a militant consumer rights organisation. In addition to the government site mentioned above.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to having lost the money so if they can get anything back it’ll be great, but I’m mostly doing this for the principle now. I might be a dumbarse anglais, but annoy me enough and I will bite back.

One of the women I work with, her son can do stuff like this, so she’ll give me his details tomorrow and I’ll get in touch for a quotation (and to talk about what happened). It needs to be done quickly.

I talked to the Mayor’s sister earlier and she nearly passed out at the bill, said I should make a complaint at the gendarmerie. Well, let’s see what Que Choisir says before getting overly dramatic.

My Amazon bits are being sent by Chronopost (God help me, I keep telling Amazon not to) and for some reason was blocked so I couldn’t have the thing delivered to a pickup point like the supermarket. So if the guy refuses to leave them somewhere ¹ then who knows what will happen. I work weekdays, they don’t appear to work weekends…

¹ In this ideal world where he doesn’t just flag “customer not present” without even bothering to turn up. It happens frequently and, surprise, there’s never a “you weren’t home” card in my letterbox…

Rick – ever thought of moving back to the UK? After next week Richie Nutsak should be down the job centre (when he isn’t at home watching Sky TV) along with all his cronies.

Unfortunately Brexit happened, despite warnings that it was a Bad Idea™. Never mind.

For what it’s worth I could almost see you on the rampage around Aldershot brandishing a minigun.

Rick – ever thought of moving back to the UK?

No.

And looking at stuff on the TV news, people’s attitudes, and so on… it seems to me as if the country has changed a lot in the near quarter century I’ve been away… and not in a good way. I think the last nearly decade and a half of Tory mismanagement has been a disaster.

After next week Richie Nutsak should be down the job centre

He has enough cash that he’ll never ever experience what that’s like and how much the DWP will screw “benefit scroungers” (as they seem to like to call the unemployed).

Remember, this is the government that said that being homeless was “a lifestyle choice”.

on the rampage around Aldershot brandishing a minigun.

WTactualF?

You do understand that “the lobby scene” was set in a simulated virtual world where everybody else was hijacked by copies of Agent Smith? That scene was ridiculously over the top gun fetishism for dramatic purposes (and given that The Matrix could turn people into Agent Smith, why couldn’t it turn bullets into bubbles? maybe because that wasn’t “cool” enough?)

Things like that just don’t happen in real life, not even in American schools…yet.

While I think that Aldershot is the epitome of nowhere interesting (or, it was a quarter century ago), I don’t hold any particular ill will towards the people unfortunate enough to live there.

So, basically, grow up mate.

Things like that just don’t happen in real life, not even in American schools…yet.

I’m mentally picturing a Texas kid getting ready for school:

school backpack – check
bag content, packed lunch (thanks mom) – check
school books – check
minigun – check (need to remember extra ammo when I’m in 4th grade)

a Texas kid getting ready for school

Isn’t there supposed to be a bible or stone slabs or something as well?

her son can do stuff like this

He has given me a verbal quote of “about a thousand” and will make up a proper quote on paper.
With taxes, that’ll probably come to about the same as the scammers.
And for that, he’ll smash through the driveway, hoike up the old pipe, lay a new (slightly larger) one, put a grille at the lower end in order that it not get crapped up with gunk, and then dig a ditch channel out to where the pond is so it all drains away nicely. It’ll be filled in with concrete to the level of the driveway (he said he won’t tarmac it as that is extremely expensive for what you get). He thinks 2-3 days of work to do it all properly.
Yah, not effing around for half an hour with a pressure washer.

I have written a letter stating that the work done was not in fact done correctly (it’s a legal thing so I avoided all snarkiness – oh, the temptation was there…) and according to the rule of “perfect achievement” (law of 1967 or something), I request that the company comes and takes note of the problem and rectifies it as soon as possible using whatever means necessary. If I do not obtain a satisfactory response within ten days of receipt of this letter, I am therefore entitled to engage another company (the woman’s son) to do the work at their expense.

Yeah, I know, it’ll be like getting blood out of a rock and a stupid little ~5 metre drain will end up costing me three grand… but as I said these are hoops that need to be jumped through for legal reasons.

I do not expect satisfaction, I expect I’ll have to pay the son to do it, then a painful rigamarole to “porte plainte” against a company that probably does not even exist.

But I do have three actual things – their phone number, the name and number of the guy that did the work, and the IBAN of where my payment went. Ought to be able to track down who is behind this from some of that… but that’s not my job, that’s for when it gets all Ally McBeal.

So, no new mower this year 😭 (unless somebody fancies GoFundMe to keep my grass cut?).

On better news, I’ll try to stop by the bank tomorrow to change my insurance. Soon a new car (thanks to mine failing it’s MOT). An electric toy car. Don’t laugh.
Oh, the irony of going from the noisiest thing on the road to one of the quietest! 😂
If that all goes well, Saturday lunchtime. And by then hopefully my fibre will be back up working again.
I think the farmer hit one of the phone poles. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Poor technician might have more than they expect needing fixed. But, then, I do wonder about the wisdom of putting fragile infrastructure on poles in a place where people operate heavy machinery with all the tact of… did somebody say Minigun? Even worse, the fibre is tight between the poles, there’s no slack so what happens when some twat in a tractor nudges a pole? Because that definition of “nudge” is a movable object meeting an unstoppable force.

Even worse, the fibre is tight between the poles, there’s no slack so what happens when some twat in a tractor nudges a pole?

Probably the same as happened to the 4G covering the car park on the south side of the Hospital of St. Cross, Rugby when the local farmer¹ decided he did not agree with the level of payment he was getting for a mast in his field and told them to remove it (wait a period) and when they didn’t, he did.
I had suggested that a land based connection through a duct to the mobile unit was a safer bet and better bandwidth, but they went with 4G as there were no cables to damage.²

¹ Think cows escaping into the car park at intervals

I think the farmer hit one of the phone poles.

Could be worse. Abut ten years ago we were driving up the hill between the two hairpins and I mentioned to Anne “That’s something you don’t see every day” – nice green flames dancing from the (overhead) phone line. Gamekeeper and estate groundsman had cleared a shedload of undesired growth from the steep field, piled up the brash and set fire to it. Directly below the phone line as it ascends the hillside.

I wonder if the fiber cables are stronger than the copper versions?

I wonder if the fiber cables are stronger than the copper versions?

No, but the normal method of stress relief is to spiral the fibre round a carrier cable so that the typical bend & stretch has a minimised effect on the fragile fibre.
e.g. Fibre run along the National Grid overheads.

Is it one glass fiber per household or one fiber for the lot?

A quick search found me this:

Seems unintuitive, but with my tests (see my blog), the actual fibre bit is miniscule and the thing that made the unpleasant cracking sound was the outer cable. The inner fibre was not bothered being tied into a pretzel.

I think what it will come down to is shock resistance. Will it split apart if it has a momentary force applied, or will the outer cable keep it together? The outer cable/sheath is very rigid and has the peculiar property that it can bend in one sense, but will make awful cracking noises if bent in the other sense.

Interior grade fibre or exterior Rick?

One cause of fibre failure is four legged with rather sharp teeth, and neither interior nor exterior is rodent proof – I’ve got some pictures somewhere.

Is it one glass fiber per household or one fiber for the lot?

At what point on the route?
Multiplexed on a fibre to a local node and single consumer from the node to CPE

Interior grade fibre or exterior Rick?

https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20240609 down towards the end/comments I take apart a piece of fibre cable.

The interior stuff is the softer inner part of the exterior cable with the exterior part stripped off…

One cause of fibre failure is four legged

Yeah, little bastards took out my security camera by gnawing through the USB cable. What concerns me is that this failure exactly corresponded with a noticeable brownout. My money is on something (repeater? exchange bit?) crashing and not rebooting correctly. Maybe I just had the bad luck to get the dodgy bit of kit?

The office where I used to work, occasionally had brownouts. Every brownout, the door locks failed, because the power supplies failed and had to be replaced.

That’s bad design. (To state the obvious.)