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| A dinosaur era telephone |
On the night I landed in the UK, my friend and I had both tried, repeatedly, to ring my mother, but all we got was the answering machine. Turns out the line was off. When it eventually came back, the phone was quiet and crackly.
So, long story short, mother tells me that the next door neighbour says that the problems have been occurring since the other next door neighbour's pump for his fish pond started flooding the manhole that has the phone line down it. The pond pump is going all the time, but it isn’t flooding anything and the phone wires definitely wouldn’t be down there to begin with. It’s impossible to tell who dreamt up that fantasy, but, of course, it HAD to be someone else’s fault!
Nevertheless, I phoned BT, who have NO engineers of their own at all now, so they make you crawl around the floor to unplug or isolate everything and run tests yourself, before they will call a sub-contractor: they say that it's to avoid you unnecessary expense. No concession for disability making that difficult.
Anyway, I did discover that the line was clearer and did not crackle, although it was still very quiet, using a corded phone plugged into the isolated test socket.
Finally, because I was following BT's instructions, I was able to persuade mother that the fault was therefore INSIDE the house and that, having tested everything else, the issue was her 20+ year old cordless phone with the buzz and crackle.
Like we’d f*cking told her it was in the first place!
