Are You Receiving?

So here I am happily taking advantage of the weekly luxury of working from home on Fridays. Yay. :-)

It gives me an extra couple of hours a day without the commute and affords a bit of a lie-in and a really good long walk avec pooch first thing, while providing a sense of an extended weekend. All this, and I still get started earlier and run a wee bit longer into the evening. All in all, very efficient and most equitable. :-))

However, all this efficiency is rendered merely theoretical as the VPN from my work laptop don't work too well today. Actually, now I think of it, the VPN hasn't worked very well for nearly a month now. And without a VPN I have no email or network connection - therefore the point of efficiency is somewhat compromised and I can't actually do any work. (Well I do have a connection of sorts, but it's very intermittent - 2 minutes on, 10 minutes off, and impossibly slow and narrow-band when on). :-(

Of course, my connection via the pretty iMac is perfect, but then I'm not using this machine to send and receive kilobytes, megabytes and sometimes gigabytes of data..

Lo. Instead of doing anything productive, I'm just getting more and more irate. :-((

So I begin the arduous and frustrating task of locating and fixing the problem. :-[

The IT guys at the office can't see a problem with my equipment. So I determine to check my broadband speed with Virgin, my ISP. :-p

After nearly 15 minutes negotiating the Kafkaesque complexity of Virgin's automated call centre, so-called customer service operation, I finally land in Bangalore or some such place on the Indian subcontinent. And after another 10 minutes of re-treading my 'problem' and listening to muzak, the 'fault' is detected. :-]

Virgin, in its infinite wisdom, decided to upgrade my already 'Large' broadband package to 'Gargantuan' with effect start of September. ..Which is nice. :-)

The only problem is that they didn't think to inform me of this service enhancement. Nor did they think it relevant or necessary to arrange delivery of a new modem capable of handling the monstrous bandwidth hike. :-[[

Doh!

Thanks for nothing, Mr. B. you arse. :-L

..And the Apple bugs reappeared yesterday with the iPhone needing its first re-boot after freezing. Not bad though -- an Apple device that lasted six weeks before its first stall.

Damn, I sometimes hate technology. Or rather my reliance upon it..

I wonder how on earth we managed before the Internet.

I know. I'll Google it.