Trying to connect you!
by Graham Smith

Freelance journalist Graham Smith, of Mediaworld, wonders about the information superhighway.

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I’m seriously thinking of changing my telephone service back to Tate and Lyle. You know, two syrup tins and a piece of string.

The telecommunications system of this country is a joke, and I’m not laughing. Having just had a short period of BT’s Home Highway, prototype designed by Dick Turpin, I decided to go the whole hog and go broadband with another provider. Constant connection, check your e-mails and feed the budgie at the same time, bakes bread etc… what a fiasco.

More engineers arrived than troops that stormed the caves in the search for Bin Laden. They stormed down the front street in yellow waistcoats brandishing drill bits long enough to enter the Olympic pole vault and three neighbours called the police fearing an imminent armed invasion.

“Have you had you welcome pack sir?” asked the supervisor, “We can’t do anything without that.”I hadn’t and began to fear the worst.

While three of them decided that the best way to wire up from the lounge to the office was by lassoing half the street and endangering the sex life of half the moggies in the neighbourhood, supervisor decided that he had something in the van which would do the trick.

Lurking among the spanners and Semtex he found the cable he wanted and a disc which would tell me how to install the system on my computer, after the house had been re-built. One shot up a ladder and butchered the external brickwork while his mate attacked the living room applying an armlock to the TV, catching his differentials on the rubber plant. The dog had by this time installed himself at a safe distance in the bedroom complete with tin helmet and anti-tank weaponry fearing Armageddon or at worst a concerted assault on his biscuit barrel.

Using a drill bit suitable for performing delicate dentistry on a rhinoceros, an engineer eventually penetrated the outer and inner walls. Cables were connected, clips clipped, joints joined and then the massed gathering sat back to await the big switch on. Broadband? No, more like a comic band. A dozen times the thing refused to install.

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