Because I was so tired on Thursday, I allowed myself an extra half an hour on Friday morning before the alarm going off. I started the day with my dirty cuppa, but didn’t do a lot else until I arrived at my desk. The poet, who had been up since 6am, fed and watered the garden birds. But apart from that, no housework was done.
Friday
The first job when I did hit my desk was Friday’s blog post. I’d been so busy with the editing, I hadn’t got around to finishing and posting in before the end of Thursday. It was mostly written, though, so all I had to do was just that. And I started today’s blog post. With that done, I got back to the editing job, this time updating the electronic file. Meanwhile, the poet attended a Teams meeting for work.
I had a lot of fun learning how tracked changes work in LibreOffice Writer and I was merrily editing away.
We’d booked a Sky engineer to come and look at the phone line on the previous Sunday, and the engineer was first supposed to be here later this week, but then they sent a text saying he could come on Friday. However, on Monday or Tuesday, the phone sprang back to life and we cancelled the engineer call. At about 10am, the engineer arrived…after we’d cancelled him. So he was sent away again.
About an hour later, I was still merrily busy when suddenly the poet complained that the internet had dropped out on his computer, and he was in the middle of work. I was working on my standalone-no-internet-connection-required LibreOffice, so I was happy enough. He waited a while, and when the internet didn’t come back on, he went off to reset it. A few minutes later he was back to say there was no phone line and the television was off too.
Grr! And we’d sent the Sky engineer packing too!
Honestly, this internet has been more trouble than it’s worth just lately, and they always fob us off, saying it’s something inside the house that’s causing the problem and not them. They don’t seem to realise that the streets around the village have been up on an almost permanent basis as new internet infrastructure is installed and a new provider is on the block.
Anyway, I started the call to Sky again, but the poet had to take over as I was still stupidly busy. He waited ages for them to confirm that yes, there was a problem, and hadn’t the engineer turned up. He patiently explained that we’d cancelled the engineer and that this was a different problem. She went away again and came back with the offer of a new engineer who could come between three and six o’clock, which was great, but we were going off on holiday at three-thirty. So she arranged for an engineer between twelve o’clock and three o’clock instead.
While he was doing that, I was making sure that the file I was working very hard on could still be viewed in Word, as my client uses Word and so does the designer. At first it failed. It was looking for Word 365, and we didn’t have any internet. Aside from that, though, I have Word 2007 on my Mac, standalone. They really, really don’t like that, do they? I had to save it as a new version of Word before Word would open it. But there, large as life, in all the colours of the rainbow, were my tracked changes!
Amazing!
And tracked changes in LibreOffice are a DREAM compared to tracked changes in Word. So I was happy to carry on. I just had to remember to save the final file as a later Word document, as my LibreOffice defaults to an older Word document, when saving as a Word file (.doc rather than .docx). I may have to give these people a donation at this rate, their products are so good. And free. And they update. And they don’t track or scrape or force anything onto you.
We had our midday breakfast, then the poet went to collect the campervan. I was finishing work at 3pm, whatever, and we had to be off and away as we had a long drive ahead and bank holiday traffic to boot.
I did as much as I physically could, but I resigned myself to the fact the editing wouldn’t be finished before we went. And I’d already decided to take Novella #10 pre-writing with us on our weekend away. Nevertheless, I still had to prepare for that and pack my fun bag with the relevant materials.
At five to three the engineer hadn’t yet arrived, so I was on the phone again reminding Sky that an engineer was booked for between 12 noon and 3pm. He rolled up as I was making the call, and said he’d literally only just received the call. He took one quick look at the junction box and said yup, there was a fault, and it wasn’t ours, He escalated the fault and said it should be fixed by the time we got back from our long weekend.
We stopped work, had something to eat, then headed off down south to Evesham. It was a small site and the pitch wasn’t as level as we’d like. But a bus runs past it each way every hour (two per hour). So it suited us. The poet cooked us scampi and chips (fries) for tea and we had doughnuts for pudding. Mine was an iced ring doughnut, his was a raspberry jam doughnut. Nom!
Saturday
The following day we woke up to another heatwave. It had been very warm in the van all night and we were gasping for air in the morning. But we were up and off as soon as we could and on our way to catch the bus into Evesham for the fishing festival. There was a lot of traffic, but we remembered there was a national train strike on Saturday.
There weren’t as many at the festival this time as there were the last time we went, a few years ago. Only 80 anglers, and only a handful of slightly famous names. (Sorry, guys!) Also, the river was apparently ‘fishing hard’, which meant there wasn’t a lot of activity on the banks either.
I’d left my watch at home so the poet bought me a cheap one off one of the stalls to tide me over. We had a 99 ice cream (cornet with a chocolate flake). And we walked up the bank one way and back before heading back into the town centre for something to eat. We had a wander round the shops, bought a couple of bits and bobs, but no souvenirs.
Our restaurant of choice was an Italian. I had a chicken salad, he had a calzone. For pudding he had tiramisu and I had…a salted caramel cakey thing with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. It was very expensive, but very nice. And by the time we got back to the campsite we didn’t want anything else to eat.
Sunday
On Sunday we went back for the second day of the festival. There were another 80 anglers, and it was much busier. Still very hot. We walked the other way along the riverbank this time and I sat and read for a bit while the poet went to stand behind one of the anglers. He found out later that the winning catch was only 8lb, which is very poor.
Perhaps it was just too hot for the fish. We didn’t even hear any reports of a pike this time, although there are lots in the River Avon. I did take a few pictures over both days, but they aren’t great.
We’d caught a later bus into town on Sunday, as it was Sunday times on the bus route, and we had to catch an earlier bus back. So we didn’t get much time in Evesham itself on Sunday, although we did do a lot of walking in the hot sun. Fortunately we have sun cream in the camper van. I hate it and it hates me, but irritated skin is better than getting burned and/or skin cancer. Even the date is still good on it. We have Factor 50 for me, and Factor 20 for when the poet thinks he’s been in the sun for too long. And we have after-sun.
For tea we had chicken-and-choritzo-filled pasta in a cheese sauce with garlic bread, and more doughnuts.
Monday
We were up and early on Monday morning as we had to be off the site by 11am. It takes us at least 2 hours to have our dirty cuppas and get the van ready to travel again as we also like to empty the grey water tank and the toilet cassette so it’s not all sloshing around. We had a good run home, only to find that we still didn’t have any phone line, any internet, or any streaming television.
I had a right old ranting phone call with Sky as a result, who denied that the engineer on Friday had escalated the call, or that anyone had said the fault was outside our property. They agreed to get someone out again by Thursday of this week. I told them this wasn’t good enough and who did I speak to in order to end our agreement. We’re out of contract anyway, so can go anywhere we like without incurring penalty charges.
I’d found out that our next-door neighbours and their next-door neighbours also had no connectivity since Friday, and on the FB page at least 2 other people had said that their BT (British Telecom) internet was down on Friday. We all piggy-back on the BT lines…I suggested to Sky that perhaps something major had happened somewhere, like the new installation engineers had perhaps accidentally unplugged a cable or cut through a cable or something.
Eventually, they said the earliest they could get anyone out was first thing Tuesday morning, which was better than Thursday but still not great. Find out what happened on Tuesday tomorrow! This one’s long enough. 😀
That is so frustrating. I hope you invoice them per hour of lost work, and demand they credit you back for every day of lost service.
They’ve already said they can’t do that, unfortunately, as it’s a residential account and they don’t do business accounts. However, I do feel we’ll get some compensation. Another engineer I wasn’t expecting called earlier and he’s pinpointed the problem down to the actual trench that was dug across the road last week. (i.e. precisely where I told them it would be…) Now it’s up to him to feed back to his contractor who will feed back to BT, who will no doubt make a claim. Then Sky will be able to make a claim, and then we’ll expect compensation too. Sky have also already offered us 2 different discount packages going forward, if we decided to stay with them after all of this. It’s unlikely to be fixed any time soon though, so I may be looking to set up camp at the library or somewhere. 😔