We had a lovely relaxing eight day holiday in Winchester and after a brief relaxing stop for lunch and exploration on our way home we arrived home quite early on Saturday afternoon. Mr C departed to obtain provisions for the week and I phoned my Mum to see how she was and learned the sad story of my Uncle’s funeral. He passed away a couple of days before we departed on our holiday and I wasn’t expecting the funeral to take place until after we returned.

Then we had the saga of fixing our internet connection which for some reason had stopped working whilst we were away. The router was rebooted several times to no avail. Mr C phoned our service provider and got through to a help line.  There were lots of questions and checks to be done. There were also lots of questions about the Scottish referendum.  I am not sure what that had to do with trying to fix our internet connection…

One and half hours later Mr C was asked to reset the router, which refused to be reset. The help line contact then said he had to go because there were other callers waiting. Mr C was told to ring back when the router had been reset.  The perfectly working router decided it didn’t want to be reset and promptly broke in the process.

This meant that on Sunday morning a trip to the shops to purchase a new router was necessary…

We got it home and tried to connect to the internet and there was still no connection. This resulted in a further call to the service provider who decided the problem was with BT (which we had suspected all along). The provider logged the fault with BT and we were told we should expect a call from BT within 24 hours of Monday morning.

A short while later Mr C received a text to say the problem had been fixed.  He checked it out…  There was still no internet connection. Mr C texted back as requested and was sent another text advising he needed to phone the service provider as they needed to speak to him again.

He phoned and they had him unscrew the plate from the wall and connect direct into the socket behind. There were questions about the micro filters which have never been fitted because they block the internet connection. Eventually the service provider decided they would log a call with BT. They then phoned back and advised that BT could come round on Tuesday morning (today).

The BT engineer, ran some tests and established there was nothing wrong with our line and left to check out the equipment at the exchange.  He came back some time later after replacing some equipment in the exchange. He did a few more tests but still could not connect to the internet. He made another call to the service provider who told him the router was faulty. He explained the router was new so they had him rebooting it instead. The connection still wasn’t working but he had fixed the BT bit of the problem so he got them to promise to call me back to explain the next stage of action. It was when he said that they were going to send a new router out that I realised they hadn’t told him to re-input the passwords after they insisted the router was rebooted.

He left because his job was done.  I entered the passwords etc and still no internet. I turned the router off, unplugged everything, waited a minute then plugged everything back in and turned the router back on again. Hey presto the red internet light turned to a friendly green.

The service provider didn’t phone back, I knew they wouldn’t.  But as I have been typing this Mr C phoned up to say he had received another text from them asking if the problem had been fixed, could he text back yes or no…

My next posts will be about my trouble free visit to Winchester