Punctuality. n. (obs.)

[caddyman]

Having spent the entire day at home, the engineer turned up ten minutes after his four-hour slot.

Anyway, the land-line is working again after some puzzled wiring and unwiring on the inside of the house, some baffled looking and brandishing of a buzzy device on the outside, followed by a walk down the street to discover the fault was in the 'street cabinet'. Unfortunately and for no readily explainable reason, the extension socket, which two engineers have now disowned as being nothing to do with Virgin Media, no longer works even partially, so I have had to unplug the big red bat-phone and shift the cordless to the front end of the living room.

It's nice to have the bat-phone, but it's nicer to have cordless extensions in the living room, bedroom and study and it's not as if we use the land-line much anyway. The last time I spoke to anyone on it was at the beginning of January, though I did get annoyed with an automated answering service on it more recently, hanging up before I actually connected to anything even remotely sentient.

I suppose that in the fullness of time, we could get the additional socket sorted out, but as I noted above, it has been disowned by two engineers, now - though the first one did fiddle with it until it worked just for shits and giggles. He said and the chap who came today confirmed that Virgin only supply the one socket as standard and we'd have to pay for an extra one. I got the impression that had he not been running late, however, he might have prodded about to see if he could have got it working anyway.

Still, we have a working phone line - we're getting the service we're paying for again. That's the main thing.

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Comments

[w00hoo.livejournal.com]

If it used to work, then it would suggest all the cable is in place and it just hasn't been punched down properly at one end or the other. If that's the case it's ridiculously easy to do providing you have a punch down tool (take the front off the working one, see which coloured wires go where, take the front off the broken one make sure the coloured wires are punched down the same.) It's a while since I've looked at an LJU, last time was to undo our home one and remove the, now superflous, bell wire but the extension is probably double jumpered (i.e. two wires in to the same slot) so that's most probably where the problem is.

Or the cables knackered, in which case that's a _lot more work_

I realise this probably doesn't actually help very much :-)