Funny how you just know something is never ever going to be straightforward, and before it’s even started, you are hurtling into the abyss of incompetence (theirs) and stress and inconvenience (yours). You just KNOW.
The switchover landline day arrived Tuesday this week, the one I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. I use my landline for almost everything and whilst I wouldn’t be without my mobile, not a huge user and certainly don’t walk around holding it in my hand or run my life on or with it. Use an iPad for most things. Additionally, I have a pacemaker so have to be aware of proximity to it when holding the mobile so don’t use for long chats or any lengthy calls if I can avoid it. Certainly don’t want to be totally reliant on it. As I understand it, we have yet to get to a point where everyone is legally obliged and forced to have a mobile and use it for everything in the universe? I'm no dinosaur but why does it feel like that?
Router upstairs in study, with cable going direct to that room from the outside of the house, main phone in hall and extension phone in bedroom. Unused phone socket in study also. So I was dreading how this was going to work out.
Technician came, all v nice and helpful, said he could use the empty phone socket in the study. So he swapped old router to Hub3 and then ran a cable from that into the phone socket which he changed to a sealed box. As that extension was running from the main phone stuff downstairs, this all seemed ideal. NOT.
Broadband on at once, all fine. Phone didn’t work but he said it would take a few hours to migrate and might take until the following morning. Sounded OK to me so off he went, promising he would ring me the following lunchtime to check it was back on. Of course he didn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
When I eventually got though on live chat, the earliest they could send a tech is Monday 26th. So six days without the landline. Deep breath. Then I get an email telling me I will be disconnected on 17 July unless I put on the adapter they are sending. This appears to be a different conversation or an automatic ping. Even with the adapter, I can’t use it as there is no phone in that socket, which is now wired to the router.
What in earth is going on? They are saying I will have automatic compensation for what will be almost a week without my phone but it’s not really about that.
Impossible to get any sense from the script reading/writing advisors on the other end of the live chat. Been four hours as I write, on WhatsApp, waiting for…not sure what exactly. Have been transferred to the faults team. Right then. Still waiting. A conversation that is totally unconnected with each other. And now fearful that after days of not working, my 35 year old landline number will disappear into the ether like others are reporting in the forum. But nobody on the other end can tell me my number is safe. It’s clearly not in the script.
Like so many others writing on here, this is turning into hell on earth and the inability to get any sense from anyone is the worst thing.
Anyone got any advice before I spontaneously combust?!
