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Well, somethings can't be predicted, I guess.

I came home from work on Thursday of last week and found my router flashing away merrily.  Not in a good way, either. 

No Internet.  Whoopee. 

My partner got on the phone to our provider and spent all of Thursday evening with an engineer who tried to get us to fix it by text.  It got to 9:50pm and Janet said: "Bugger this, they close at 10!"

So she phoned them again and refused to have text support.  This time the engineer spoke to her for 5 minutes or so and then said they'd send a new router out.  It would take two days. 

So Friday is day one and Saturday is day two, right?  Well, apparently not.  Sunday would have been day two, except Sunday doesn't count which meant the new router was delivered on Monday. 

We eagerly set the new, bigger, brighter router up Monday evening after getting home from work and bam... no, we weren't away.  Still no connection.  So Janet gets on the phone again. 

Despite her telling the engineer (should they be classed as engineers when all they do is tell you what to do?) that we'd done all these tests days ago, we had to go through the same process again. 

Two hours later the guy at the end of the phone says they'll send a new router to us.  This is when Janet really loses it... and the guy at the other end of the phone hears that (at last) and says an engineer will come out tomorrow. 

What did they find?  Well we'd had a visit from an engineer on Thursday whilst we were both at work, obviously, and this person hadn't replaced a wire in the outdoor box correctly.  Easily done, apparently.  So all that was needed was for the wire to be plugged into the correct socket. 

In the interest of keeping my hair on I'm going to gloss over the obvious: this should have been the thing they checked on the Thursday evening. Hey, at least we got a new router out of this debacle.

The reason I'm mentioning this at all is to explain why I haven't updated the Diplomacy aspects of the blog.  No internet at the weekend.  What do the TV channels say?  Technical difficulties. 

You see I often don't get time to blog during the week so I write at the weekend.  Now, I've got my mitts on a new tablet so I can write on the way to work (I'm on it now so I apologise for the clumsiness of any typos that creep in).  Unfortunately the Android Blogger app is less useful than I'd like so these posts are very basic. 

The eventual aim will be to write, publish and then edit at the weekend to add links, pics and other useful stuff.  But hopefully I will be able to get basic posts up more regularly. 

Now the trick will be in writing short enough posts to do this..! 
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