Weekly Rundown: The Internet-less Edition

This week has been a long week.

One of the reasons why it has been a long week is because of our complete isolation from the rest of the world. We have been without an internet connection.

I should probably clarify this somewhat. I’ve not been completely internet-less. I’ve obviously had access at my in-laws’ house as usual, but at home and the surround area; nada!

Vodafone have been having issues it would seem. About a month ago we started having issues with our mobile phone signal. People who actually use their mobiles for making phone calls noticed their calls dropping, while people who predominantly use them for texting noticed those weren’t sending even when they had a full signal. Weird.

We got in contact with them, were promised compensation when it was fixed and sure enough, about ten days later everything returned to as it should have been.

And then funny things started to happen with the mobile internet. It would show a connection but nothing would load, you’d get a message telling you that you were offline even when you knew you weren’t because an email had just come in. It got worse and worse and worse until the Friday before last when it disappeared at some point around teatime and is yet to come back in any useable capacity.

Frustrating, no?

This frustration was made somewhat worse by the fact that neither Mr Click nor myself could remember the number to dial to speak to Vodafone (FYI, it’s 191 from a Vodafone mobile). And we had no internet to look it up. We suffered through Saturday and then got onto the Live Chat on Sunday. We tried resetting stuff to no avail and were eventually called by the technical team who promised further contact.

Well, I was a little impatient by Tuesday, having seen no improvement and not yet having heard about where our service had vanished to. So we got back on the Live Chat. This time the guy assured us it was an issue with our phones and set about basically going through changing all the same settings and procedures as we’d done on Sunday, this time calling it a Hard Reset instead of a Soft one. He then told me it would take up to an hour to get the connection back and ended the chat.

I was not convinced. And rightly so. I managed to load about three pages and then the connection vanished again. I was more than a little bit annoyed at this point so the next day we called, deciding we’d had enough of faffing about on chat.

Finally they admitted that there was a fault in our area which was affecting service and promised to keep us informed as to its repair. We had the option of receiving texts or emails about this. For obvious reasons we went with the text option.

And so far. That’s all we’ve heard. It has improved slightly. When you get a connection it’s usually there long enough to load a couple of pages, but when it goes, there’s no knowing when it will come back or for how long. And that was where I left this post yesterday when I wrote it. Since then we have been on the chat again which resulted in them sending us something to install on my phone which made no difference before getting the technical team to call us, where Mr Click went round in circles before I took over the phone call.

The technical team's grand solution to our problem was to send us a text with instructions to change exactly the same settings we changed a week ago with no change in the service. Seriously! Can you tell that I wasn't impressed by this?

So now we're waiting for new SIM cards which we've been promised will fix the problem. Like we haven't heard that one before.

*Sigh*


In other news, I got a lovely shiny new camera which I will be showing off at some point in the future. I’m still getting to grips with it (both literally and figuratively) and learning the settings but it takes wonderful photos. I’m really looking forward to playing with it.