Late again.

So much for my resolution to write this up more often!

It is Friday and the website should have been updated on Wednesday, and it isn't. Got down to the garage on Weds morning to find that the internet connexion wasn't working. It goes down briefly quite often, but this time it wouldn't come back, so I phoned the broadband company. A nice young man in Cardiff patiently talked me through all the bootings and rebootings and pulling out of connections, and I patiently followed his instructions even though I had done those some actions myself several times before phoning.

After twenty minutes he said he would have to phone me back, which he did, and after another ten minutes he admitted that there did appear to be a fault in their line and said he would book me an engineer. My heart sank, as last time this meant a wait of ten days, during which time my only access to my emails and orders was through the local public library. But on looking he found an engineer who could come round that morning. And what is more, the chap arrived within a quarter of an hour.

More tests, which in the end he said only proved that I had some undefined fault in my own system. He went and got his laptop to show me that it would work fine. He got it. He plugged it in. He fiddled. He fiddled some more. It did not work. He went off to attach it to the junction box down the road. After ten minutes he came back and said there must be some as yet unreported fault covering a large area of Cambridge. Off he went.

I then had to find something to do with my day. Life without broadband is like a deadly dull limbo. You can't read emails so can't process orders. You can't check the news, listen to the radio, suss out the page of lies that the BBC calls a weather forecast. I opted for cataloguing books, but even that isn't easy if there is no access to Amazon, the Library of Congress and the British Library. Even if a book is already on my database, its current price has to be checked out on Amazon. And if it isn't on my database I need to download the details (via Readerware) from either Amazon or one of the other two sites I've mentioned above. So even the cataloguing option wasn't a complete operation.

When the postman came I had nothing for him, but at 3.50 the Virgin engineer phoned to say that he had been told that the system was up and running. He said he'd phone back in ten minutes to check if I had managed to get back online. Well I didn't, and he didn't, so after an hour and a half I phoned Virgin again. They checked, and told me that though the system was now largely up and running locally, there were still some problems with individual routing stations. Finally, yesterday morning at around 11am we went back online and I set to and processed the orders that had accumulated over the previous two days. And later this morning I will actually get to updating the website.

In the meantime Cambridge continues dull, breezy, and not all that warm. However, my internet connexion works, so all is bright in the world!