Phone line dead again

…about a mile up the road were workmen digging holes to lay new water pipes. They appeared to be blessed with neither intelligence nor competence. I think you can see where this is going…

🤦🤦🤦

…down the drain?

A few years ago BT would reimburse you a month’s rental (or a week’s rental) for each day on which your service was disrupted. They have learnt now that their contractors are rubbish (they often dig up cables) and so don’t offer such generous compensation any more!

A few years ago BT would reimburse you a month’s rental (or a week’s rental) for each day …

But this is Orange France territory!

Not so long ago in our hamlet in France a gang of thieves stole some kilometres of overhead cables and we were without service for some weeks – no-one compensated us at all!

This is France. According to their own forums, there is no such thing as a refund. If you really want some money back you need to set a lawyer on them and should expect something derisory like €1/day even though you’re probably paying 2-3 times that. Customer service is kind of unknown here. Don’t take my word for it, if you can read French look up Que Choisir (like Which?).

Maybe it would be quicker and easier to sue the idiots that did this:

It goes under the road there, on the outward side of the connection. Which means Orange is probably going to have to arrange to dig up the road. No idea how far back the cable bundle goes our if it’ll all need to be dug up. I can see this mess taking a while to sort out.
[insert appropriate expletive]

What I have going for me is it wasn’t just me. What I have going against me is that we have no 3G (down in a valley, sort of). Mobile comms is taking forever (I’m standing in the field!) so I can imagine the farmers are using their phones as modems at the moment.

Something interesting to note is that there are three cables in the bundle, but the phone pole a short way off only has one coming out of the ground. I wonder what the other two cables are? I did a phone number test on the mayor so they didn’t cut the town off. Hmm…?

Getting too chilly to stand out here much longer. I’ll go home and watch some DVDs, maybe finish season two of Round The Twist :-)

Did you get your phone line fixed Rick?

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