Last Fri­day week our ISDN stopped work­ing. No phone, no modem, there­fore no inter­net. Today we have it back — 10 fault report phone calls, 8 ago­nis­ing days, 3 Tel­stra tech­ni­cians, and one mas­sive mobile phone bill later.

The prob­lem in the end? The wires hadn’t been crimped prop­erly by the Tel­stra tech­ni­cian who orig­i­nally put the sys­tem in, so they had fallen out. Could have hap­pened at any time. The first two Tel­stra tech­ni­cians had appar­ently inves­ti­gated the line right up until it went inside the house, and found no prob­lem. The third guy man­aged to get it. Hulla-f’in-lujah. If Dave hadn’t got­ten quite angry on the phone it would have been next week before they even sent the third guy out to look at it. Grrrrrr.

The whole episode was extremely frus­trat­ing, not half because I had a whole stack of side-projects on the go that needed my atten­tion, like, last week. It’s hard on a geek! So I get to spend this (long — yay!) week­end catch­ing up. Expect a few posts.