Philip Norton

Last year I wrote about BT taking me for a ride, where they plain and simply failed.

Well yesterday Mandy got home and noticed two BT engineers at the top of the telegraph pole outside our house. After going inside they came to the house and said (and I’m not kidding here)

"Are you having a phone line installed?"

You would have thought they would know! Anyway, after Mandy explained that we had already got a phone line installed, and that we certainly didn’t want another one, they insisted that it was our house. Mandy, standing her ground, said that we had one installed a year ago and certainly didn’t want another as that had cost £125 and has probably gone up by now. So they went back to their van, got a bunch of bits of paper together and went into the following conversation with each other.

BT Guy 1 "what number was it again?"
BT Guy 2 (Sifting papers) "where is the sheet with the number on it?"
BT Guy 1 "It’s that sheet there."
BT Guy 2 (Pauses) "Which one?"
BT Guy 1 (Points) "That one."
BT Guy 2 (Sifts papers about) "This one?"
BT Guy 1 (Points) "No, the bottom of that one."
BT Guy 2 (Picks up paper) "Oh…"
BT Guy 1 (Look at paper) "Oh, maybe it’s not this bit…"

This went on for about 5 minutes until they came to the blinding conclusion that it wasn’t our house they wanted, but one down the street!

Is it just coincidence that BT come to our house and try to install a phone line about a year to the day that they did it in the first place? Probably, but it is just another fiasco in a long running multitude of fiascos. Sort yourselves out BT!

I was just thinking the other day that my computer was running fine, and I hadn’t needed to re-install it for at least 6 months. However, I think I might have thought too soon as when I got home on Thursday it was acting very odd. For some reason it wouldn’t allow me to paste text into Word and it kept spontaneously logging me off of the internet chat program I use (Pidgin). So I do what I normally do in that situation and restarted the machine to see if it would be okay.

The answer was a big no. The thing wouldn’t start again. It would get to a file called “mup.sys” and just utterly fail. No amount of fiddling would stop this file crashing the machine. Looking into mup.sys it seems to be a resource controller file, so I can only assume that whatever it was controlling was corrupt. It has taken me 2 days to get the thing back into working order as I had to make sure I have backed up all of my files. It’s still a pain in the posterior.

I like Microsoft, I think they do a pretty good job, and their usability is quite good as well. But why can’t they make an operating system that doesn’t need a full reinstall ever 6 months? It’s getting a bit annoying really. I have tried to move over to Linux (I have SUSE 10 installed on my other hard drive) but I just don’t know where everything is, and anything even slightly complicated involves editing system files and using the command prompt.

Still, everything is sorted now so I should be aright for another 6 months.