I am Back

For the last three weeks I have been forced into silence.
I have not gone into a monastery.
I have not been sick.
I have not lost interest in economic and political issues.

No. I moved house. Actually that was the easy bit. It only took a couple of days. The hard bit was getting the Internet connected at my new home. I had moved out of the area with cable access, so I had to change to ASDL. That seemed to make the whole process incredibly difficult.

I phoned my ISP a week before the move and was told there would be no problem. Their customer services manage wrote a nice letter saying that I would be connected to broadband a week after my new phone line was connected. That seemed like a long time in the informatin age, but I knew I would be busy unpacking, so did not worry.

The phone was connected as soon as we moved. Ten days went by and still no Internet connection. I got on the phone. I had too listen to canned music for twenty minutes before, I got through to the call centre. Eventually I got to speak to a charming young woman, who could read from a script, but could not tell me why I was not connected or when I would be connected. This happened several times. On one occasion, I was told that there was a ten minute wait to speak to the person who could answer my questions. After trying politeness several times, I eventually tried being rude, but that did not make much difference.

Eventually, on Wednesday a courier delivered a new modem. A letter from the ISP explained how to connect, but said I should use a userid and password that they had emailed to me. Duh!!! I did not have an internet connection, so how did they expect me to read their email.

I could not bear another dose of canned music, so I visited a friend to read my email and get my password. After a three week delay, I am no back in action. This does not really seem like the information age. And I am not sure what words like "service", "provider" and "customer services" mean. I have not seen much of any of these.

It certainly hows that the bureaucratic disease is not limited to the civil government. It also afflicts large Australian telecommunications companies.

The good thing is that I do not have the shakes and I did not break into cold sweats while I was cut off from cyberspace. This shows that I am not addicted to the Internet, as some of my friends and family have suggested.