On the hard shoulder of the information superhighway

If you ever look back fondly on days gone by, remember this – there was no internet. The past, therefore, sucks big time.

Back in June, I penned a column for your edification in which I contemplated the merits of a digital detox, and spending some time offline and away from screens of various sizes. Weak-willed techno-ponce that I am, I didn’t.

The cruel hand of fate (or BT, as they’re also known) intervened last weekend, skilfully converting a non-existent phone connection into a full-blown broadband outage simply by sending an engineer to our house.

Cut adrift without the internet piped into our home at high velocity, our coastal location and thick walls also means we have no mobile signal either. Bad enough that this occurred over a Bank Holiday weekend, but we also had a couple of days off work too to supersize our time at home.
v The horror of being ‘outernet’ struck quickly. We had to go for a walk to be able to report the broadband fault. “Can you give us an alternative number to contact you?” Er... no.

No email. No Facebook. Mrs G was unable to live-tweet The Great British Bake Off. We even had to use the red button service on the TV to find out what the weather was going to do in “The North”.

All those moments where we’d normally just look something up (How old is Gillian Anderson? Do bees have knees?), but couldn’t, resulted in an uneasy sensation of knowledge left undiscovered.

We’ve even been unable to gain access to that most fundamental of human rights – cat videos on Youtube. I’m starting to feel like people are staring at me with pity on the streets of towns, which is the only place we can get online briefly.

Still, I have read an actual printed thing (I think it was called a ‘magalazine’), had several conversations that weren’t typed, and dismantled my old washing machine, so it’s not all bad, right?

Wrong – it’s hideous. It’s like being in the 1990s all over again, and they really were dreadful. I’ll be wearing a “tracky” next and developing a hankering for glowsticks.

No scantily clad women have appeared unsolicited in my eyeline during the last week, unless you count accidentally flicking past the ladies underwear section in the Next catalogue I read out of boredom. (The plot is pretty weak, but the pictures were nice.)

A trip to Edinburgh saw us temporarily back online, but as the point was to have a lovely day out and not spend it looking at our phones, it was bittersweet. Excitingly, a petite street performer rubbed their tight booty up against me during a fire juggling routine. He seemed like a really nice chap too.

To submit this column, I’ll have copied it onto a memory stick and taken it into the office. I wonder if they lock the building overnight? Maybe if I close the blinds they won’t see the light from my laptop...

This post might have first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 2nd of September 2016. As the appearance of columns on their website is intermittent at best, and the copy posted out to me hasn't appeared the last two weeks, I'm hoping it did - who knows? 

We're now treating the vanishing of our phone and internet as an annual event. We should probably stock up on bottled water and tinned food next year, in case they move on to somehow disconnecting the water and electricity too. I wouldn't put it past them. 

As usual, it was bloody hard to get in touch with BT too. It's always a delight when you have an online chat when logged into your account, but to set it up you have to supply your name, account number and phone number. Then supply it all again when the agent comes online.

They made a big thing of sending out emails and advertising recently, saying how they were going to be sorting problems even faster. After logging the phone fault, the system told us that their aim was to repair the fault by Friday - 3 days later. Next contact from them: an engineer on our doorstep Saturday lunchtime. He couldn't fix it (and then the internet ceased too). We finally got back online the following Thursday. 9 days after reporting the phone fault and 5 days without broadband.

Hear that sound? That's a slow handclap...

(CD A-Z: On hold again for a new CD - the deluxe edition of a-ha's "Memorial Beach". Mmmm... bonus CD goodness.)