“I don’t climb poles, and you won’t find another engineer who does…”

At the second time of asking, BT finally managed to connect a small piece of wire from the box in the downstairs hallway in our flat to the very large telegraph pole outside, thus providing us with a working telephone service. You’d think this would be a reasonably simple exercise, but apparently it’s not–it takes almost three hours, and requires any number of BT employees to turn up in the street outside. Every time I looked outside to see what was going on, and just when I thought they might nearly be finished, it seemed that someone else had turned up with some even more elaborate piece of equipment. At one point I counted 4 different BT vans parked outside in our small street, along with a gaggle? jobsworth? (I dunno, what’s the collective noun?) of BT staff.

Last week’s engineer had refused to go anywhere near the pole outside, but today’s chap was all too happy to climb up his ladder to get to the top and fiddle about for a while. Naively, I presumed that that might be it, but a short while later one of those cherry picker things turned up to send a different bloke up there to actually connect up the wire. But, finally, some three hours after they first arrived, we had a dial tone. It’s a small victory.