April 1st Sky visit
Took the afternoon off from work so as to meet the BT Openview engineer and hopefully get my broadband sorted out.
Got home are around 12:50 and instantly noticed that a bit of extra work had been done on the house as the shuttering over the removed windows now extended down to the floor. I also noticed a little later that my main wheelie bin had disappeared too, hmmm, I’m getting a bit sick of this.
Anyway I went into my house to find that the windows and stonework underneath had been completely removed and the shuttering was now covering a gap that would soon be occupied by a pair of French doors. The steelwork too had had a bit of work and it was now covered in a deep burgundy steel preserver of some type. Things were coming on, I wasn’t unhappy too to find that there weren’t any builders there as I knew I’d have to spend the entire afternoon there and I didn’t fancy being a fifth wheel while everyone else was busy.
Had a word with a couple of blokes across the road about the bin and they reckoned that someone might have mistakenly taken it in a couple of doors up. Not wanting to knock on someones door and basically call them a crook I declined on making the move to knock on their door and retired to my house to wait for the BT engineer.
Amazingly a BT engineer showed up around 2:30 and a very nice guy Andrew was. He plugged in devices and assessed that although I was getting 5Mb/sec at the router (think we’ve been her before) it was somehow not authenticating back to the exchange. He felt that the problem didn’t lie with the lines back to the green box or between the green box and the exchange but it was either with the router authentication or it was with the exchange.
Andrew tried to get in touch with Sky but didn’t have much luck and I felt that the job was going to fall flat on its face so I picked up my phone and got through to the Sky support line that I’d been using for such a long time. I got through to a girl called Beverley and asked to speak to Paul to whom I’d spoken to last and a few times before. Beverley kindly put me through to Paul and he remembered my case, I filled him on the details and then passed him across to Andrew.
Anyway this is what I wanted and this was working. Andrew was telling Paul that it wasn’t the line and Paul was telling Andrew that it wasn’t to do with authentication. There was a lot of techno speak going on, Andrew went to the kitchen and checked out the connection in the window (the one with the spider in it I’d photographed a couple of weeks back). They were soon figuring out where the problem was and what could have taken weeks was now being resolved in a matter of a few hours.
After some time they’d determined that the problem wasn’t at the router, it wasn’t on any of the lines, it wasn’t with the spider and its home it was in the exchange. Andrew left to go to the exchange and Paul explained the lay of the land. It seems that my account had been disconnected and that they’d suspected I was on a particularly bad connection in the exchange. The thing was though, that as I had been disconnected they would normally but me onto another connection once I was reconnected, the chances of me going to the identical connection would be thousands to one, it turns out I was still on the old connection. Andrew was going to the exchange to check the connection and he’d hopefully get me back online.
Andrew turned up around six, it had taken all afternoon, I was freezing by then too as I’d not managed to find the time to get out of my work gear and the heating was still off. Anyway he explained that the kit in the exchange wasn’t Sky’s and that was a bit of the problem, it was BT’s and Sky leased it. He explained too that he’d not managed to get it working yet but he was going to keep the call open and deal with it tomorrow, he’d now reconnect me (I don’t know if he meant he’d connect me to a new port) and then test it in the morning. I explained that I’d be at work but there might be builders on site who could let him in, failing that he filled in my passcode into his phone and hopefully if I had a signal he’d be able to check the broadband without even being on site.
Anyway Andrew left and I ran out and persuaded him to replace the box in the kitchen if he managed to get inside tomorrow and once he left I got a call from Sky.
My case at Sky had now been passed from the lovely Paul to a new person in Andy, Paul had left at six and was going on holiday so Andy had been given the task of working on my case. I explained as best I could what had gone on with BT’s Andrew that afternoon and Andy promissed to give me a ring back this Thursday to check it was all working then.
Hmm, now sat in front of the fire watching the Manchester Utd vs Bayern Munich match while typing this, freezing despite now having the fire on. I cannot wait to get my thermal store up and running.