Monday 26 December 2011

Back on line

Since I last blogged, I have been away for a 4 day break in Prague leaving Mike to look after all the dogs and the farm, including wading around in mud as a result of the all the digging involved with the new barn combined with the rain, which has made the whole place pretty squidgy. Not only that, but my son,  David asked him to look after his dog, Jax whilst he and Jane went away for the night to celebrate his birthday with friends.  What a star - Mike, I mean.  He just takes it all in his stride.

Pauline and I had an amazing weekend visiting the Christmas markets in the old and new towns as well as sampling the local cuisine and seeing the sights.  The locals were very friendly and helpful and the only slight downside was that literally every other shop was a souvenir shop with almost identical, although in most cases quite lovely, goods.  Their speciality is glass and jewellery which come in some really beautiful forms, but not very practical for transporting home.

When I got home and finally got round to checking my emails I found that none had been received since the 11 December and discovered that my broadband was down.   Then followed a frustrating few days when I was given conflicting information and made to repeat the same tests over and over under the instruction of call centre operators whom I could barely understand because of the strong Indian accents.  Five or six operators and hours later and after being told variously that there was an outage and then there wasn't and then I must bedoing something wrong,  I decided to get the local IT repair  man in to check that I had correctly set up the equipment and replaced all the filters etc: etc:  and another hour and £56 later he confirmed that it was definitely a fault with the broadband  line and nothing to do with my equipment.  The  last call to the Indian call centre confirmed that there was definitely an outage and they would send an engineer on Friday 23rd - 12 days after the fault started.

My neighbour let me use her PC to pick up the online orders for Alpacastuff products and I had to hand write them and bring them home to type out as her printer had run out of ink!  I phoned the customers concerned and explained the situation and they were all understanding and I hope received their orders in time.

I changed several appointments on that date to ensure I would be here between 8 a.m. and 1p.m. but on the day he phoned to say the fault was at the exchange.  He came out anyway to check the lines but they were fine except that the phone in Mike's workshop was faulty.  He recommended  changing it as it would be slowing down the broadband speed.  Anyway we were finally there and luckily most of the 183 emails that had been held up were headed straight for the Junk Mail folder so not much was lost.

After quite a busy time in the shop in the lead up to Christmas we are closing until further notice as the building works will be starting in earnest in the new year and we think it will be awkward to park and probably very dirty and lots of coming and going with materials and machinery.

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