I had some phone spam yesterday from some American company doing an opinion poll.

Once I worked out it responded to buttons on my phone I spent a gleeful five minutes prodding random buttons. Then, tiring of this I hung up… but the other end didn’t… for ten minutes until an operator came on to take my details so they could send me my winnning prize.

So I hung up on him instead, which seemed to clear the line.

Next time I may respond with “Autorisation code please… what? how did you get this number. Forget you ever called and never call back, this is an unlisted number”

I found a message on my mobile from a BT engineer saying my line was repaired and working. My Internet is back to its normal speed and the line quality seems to be normal again. I’ll see if callers complain about noise on the line when someone gets round to ringing me.

After checking the line was working I noticed I had a voicemail from Tuesday. It was from a local dentist wanting to know if I wanted to be a patient with them. Kind of handy since back on Tuesday I only noticed my line was faulty because I wanted to ring a dentist and join them. They’re NHS too so I think that means its cheaper.

So two things have been sorted in one, and I now have an appointment on the 22nd of October where they will no doubt prod my teeth with their metal spikes and decide half my fillings need replacing. Then again I do need a filling repairing so maybe that’ll distract them and I’ll get away with a filling I need and a scale and polish.

I don’t understand this one. My phoneline is dead, it “doesn’t work” in that if I pick up a handset and listen, there’s no dialtone. All I can hear is whatever the speaker picks up, which seems to indicate there’s current running down the line - although it’s not enough to power a normal plug in phone, that just sits there dead.

And yet, here I am, on the Internet through the same phone line. Admittedly I am connected at 2Mb/sec, and the line is mostly full of CRC errors, but it’s working and that makes me really confused. If I pick up my phone there’s a burst of static that dies away and then the line is quiet.

I now know there are no public payphones to the right of my house for at least a mile, the nearest one being to the left, about half a mile away. I knwo this because I set off on a walk to find one to ring BT to report the fault on my line (ring an 0800 number from a mobile? I think not). The phone I eventually found had a large sticker on it saying it was due for removal because not enough people use it.

That’s just great that is. OK so they get vandalised, tramps sleep in them/use them as toilets and they now cost 40p for a call, but when your own phoneline is broken, they’re a really handy way of calling BT for free. Dialling 0800 numbers from a mobile is not free, which is stupid.

The BT fault checker found a fault with my line and after a lot of checking, some more checking and a little bit of looking at the state of my line, told me it’d be fixed by Thursday. Isn’t that wonderful! I hope there’s something expensive wrong that keeps people busy for hours tonight, and that in fixing it they make my ADSL run faster afterwards.

It’s amazing just how cheaply we can talk to each other now. The other day I had a two hour Skype video call with someone, later that same person phoned me using a cheap call service and it cost him zero pence per minute; so after finding out the name of this company and signing up I can also now make free phone calls during the day.

On Friday I needed to demo some software I’d created, and talk about some design ideas for it. After five minutes of attempting to talk through the stuff over the phone we both gave up and used XP’s Remote Assistance to great effect. I was able to speak on the phone (using the previously mentioned free call service) while waving my mouse around his screen. It was really productive and worked extremely well.

Today I received a letter from BT telling me my cheap mobile discount plan was due to expire, and unless I phoned them they’d start charging me for it. So I phoned them to cancel the plan as I never really got any benefit from it. While on the phone BT told me that I now have free evening and weekend calls to all BT landlines.

So now I can ring people for free, which is how it should be.

I find this all quite interesting since I am ploughing my way through the Best of 2600 book I bought earlier. Right now I’m at the part where the American phone system is being split up, resulting in loads of little phone companies, confusing dialling systems, long distance providers and the general confusion that arises when something like this happens. There’s a lot of articles from the 80s in this chapter of the book where people attempt to guess what the future will be like, and whether it’ll be just as confusing. Well 20-odd years on and it’s not as confusing in general - we can at least direct-dial numbers for most places on the planet now, but choosing just who should carry your calls can be a complicated and time consuming process.

Fantastic… the day before I go on holiday to the Alps for a week my phone dies. And being one of my pieces of technology, it just has to die in the most irritating way possible. While attempting to send an SMS the screen just went blank, and now it won’t un-blank.

The rest of the phone works! It’s just received an SMS, and I can dial out and receive calls, but the screen remains totally black and non working. It can’t be a mechanical failure since I was using the phone when it happened, so all I can think is that the firmware has buggered itself in (it is a Windows Mobile device after all) and something has told the screen to turn off, but hasn’t told it to turn back on again.

So, before we go on holiday tomorrow, we’re off to the Orange shop to either get them to magic it back alive (highly improbable) or for me to buy a new phone. And it’s going to have to be a cheap phone since I wasn’t really intending on buying a phone again for a long time. I was going to buy a 1TB hard disk for my server, but now need to use that money for a sodding phone.

If I hadn’t been a mobile phone user for the past 10 years and this was my first experience with them, I’d probably not bother getting a replacement.

My phone has gone a bit nuts ever since I put the PAYG SIM in it. First it got stuck in a reboot loop until I managed to trick it into working by turning on ‘flight mode’, powering off the phone and putting the SIM in, then disabling flight mode. Then at the weekend it wouldn’t send text messages, instead simply queueing them up and greying out the ‘Send message’ option.

And yeah, the insurance didn’t carry over from when I cancelled my contract either.

Flight leaves tomorrow afternoon, so no updates until I return. When I do return, expect a torrent of back-dated entries (unless I find wifi over there).

My phone’s working now. But to do this I had to

1. Ring them back and tell them it wasn’t working
2. Ring back again because their computers weren’t working
3. Be transferred three times, eventually going back to the ever-helpful “concerns department” back in the UK
4. And then be put on hold because the previous call centre had my account locked
5. Then I had to ring the call centre again to link my debit card to my phone for topups
6. And now the only thing not working is the website stuff - it thinks I still have a contract, and happily informs me that my account is disabled. I did try ringing up about this, but failed to get my point across at all

My phone now has £10.01 in credit, I am on the Dolphin calling plan and have 300 free messages to abuse.

Steve came over today and we spent a pretty productive day churning out code. We did it tag-team style with one of us writing and debugging while the other fiddled with the database, then when one of us came across code witten by the other, we’d switch jobs and continue.

Mobile’s still not working though.

I’m stopping my Orange contract and have just received a PAYG SIM and topup card from them. Amusingly the topup card expires in 2029 so I’m going to make it my aim to keep it until then

When ringing the activation number I first managed to confuse the voice recognition system, and then the human I got through to explained he couldn’t help me because his computer wasn’t working. I laughed, lots and will phone back later.

Photo from Wikipedia

After looking at the amount of money I throw down the drain every month, and feeling slightly irritated that most of it I have to pay, I’ve been looking at things to chop out or pay slightly differently. After weeding out my council tax, insurance, rent and other things like that number 1 on my list of “whoa that looks a bit expensive” was my mobile phone.

I’m on a contract, it costs me £35 a month including typical call usage and other junk (insurance and an Internet bundle). My family and everyone else I know with a mobile has a pay-as-you-go and it seems to cost them at most £10 a month.

So off I go to ring a certain fruity telecoms company to ask a very straight forward question “How do I switch from contract to PAYG, and will it cost me anything?”. I found their number and encountered their automated system, from which none of the options sounded remotely useful. I opted for “I want to change my billing details, but not my contact details, or payment details, I have another query” and within a few rings got through to a nice human being.

Since this is the modern world with the magic of VOIP, the person I had on the end of my phone was not in the same country as me. I am fairly certain he wasn’t on the same continent as me. I asked my question and he answered it in a pleasing way, informing me it would be free to go from contract to PAYG, and would I like to do this?

Well yes I would, this is so easy and I am happy!

OK, so I have to go on hold and be transferred to the relevant department (probably the bloke in the cubicle next to him). And here’s where spanners start falling into the works. Due to a bit of good old Chinese Whispers and misunderstanding they assumed I had already cancelled my contract, and already had a replacement PAYG SIM, ready to be activated. No, I don’t… I want one, is it still free? Does any of what I’m asking make any sense to you, or have you run off your script and are rapidly ad-libbing into a nasty dark pit of confusion?

Hm? Yes, I can hold again I guess… this is turning into a game, I no longer care if my query gets sorted, I want to see how many people I can talk to. I’m bored with nothing else to do today.

The crappy hold music ends, the line goes silent… and after some confusion an very nice English lady comes on the line. Hurrah! Someone I can speak to in my normal tone of voice, using normal slang, at my normal speaking speed, through a line that doesn’t sound like damp string. I may just get somewhere yet… This callcentre woman was good, she’d obviously been given the freedom to listen to her callers, think a bit, and suggest ideas to help them. She wasn’t a robot reading from a script.

She told me that no, unlike what the other lot had said (she didn’t sound too impressed with them either) it wouldn’t be free, I would have to buy out the end of my contract. So I did, since I have to pay that money even if I choose to give up and remain a loyal, money pissing contract customer. Replacement SIM will arrive within a week and “all” I have to do is ring back and get it activated.

So yeah, I’ll have to go back to the giant chicken farm and hope they can understand my routine request to have a PAYG activated.

A small point to make

Please do not fall under the misunderstanding that I dislike the people in the foreign callcentres that I spoke to originally. I’ve got no problem with them. my problem is with the companies that decide to shunt our calls over to another continent, without deciding whether the idea works socially. I’m English, I speak a certain way, using certain phrases and with an accent. If I was asked to handle calls coming from the other side of the planet I’d probably get things equally confused, mixed up and wrong.

Just because something is technically possible, and will save money, doesn’t mean it’s always socially acceptable. Outsourced, foreign callcentres are just bad bad inventions. It’d be like me teaching my kids by slapping a pile of instructions on their desks and saying “get on with it”. It’d work, but it wouldn’t be very good.

Amy went off to visit some people in Doncaster today, leaving me at home to do some tedious school planning. We almost missed the train to Doncaster, me dropping her off at the station and saying “I’ll ring you in five minutes to see if you made it” and her running into the station.

I went for an amble around Maplin for a bit, coming out with a new A/V switcher for my various consoles. I rang her and got no answer, and a quick check at the station confirmed she must have made the train. Still, bit odd not being able to ring her. I continued home…

And when I went into the front room I found her phone on the settee… with 17 missed calls from the people she was going to visit. It rang another six times before a Doncaster number came up which I answered and discovered a slightly pissed off Amy on the other end. I was instructed to text the people she was meeting, explain the situation and get them to collect her from Doncaster station.

This I did, and she called back about ten minutes later asking me to ring them and ask where they were, she having now been stood there for at least half an hour in the cold and rain. So I did and received the news that the other people were “lost” and couldn’t find the station. This was duly relayed to Amy and was greeted with a certain amount of swearing

She said she’d ring me when she was coming home and I continued about my afternoon slightly bemused and wondering what was happening.

Later that afternoon I got a call from Amy saying she was at Doncaster station and about to get on a train back home. I made plans to leave after half an hour to meet her. Ten minutes later I got another call saying she was there, it seems trains go a bit quicker on Sundays.

After the day’s ordeal we sat down for some tea and watched Resident Evil before making a trip to my parents’ to drop off the dog.