It Never Rains But It Pours

The saga of the Freezone internet finally came to an end yesterday and the Instanta broadband was back online after almost three weeks of being down. During the three weeks, the lads from MCS (our local computer company) have been regular faces here in the office in their attempts to reconnect us to the outside world and when they were not waiting for Freezone to answer the phone they made a few suggestions for improvements to the current network. A new shelf in the computer tower would make sense and take strain off some wires that were a bit overstretched. So Tony arranged for said shelf to be fabricated this morning and when Kevin put it into place he managed to do something to one of the wires which resulted not only in us no longer having any broadband but no computer network. So, having gone from being without email and internet we went to having no computers at all. As I write (on my own laptop) one of the MCS lads is taking our server back for inspection and I can only hope that the problem isn’t fatal. I sometimes think that we are reliving a Charlie Chaplin, Norman Wisdom or M Hulot film here.

Speaking of Norman Wisdom, Marion and I returned to Preston on the train from Euston on Sunday evening. After running over Marion’s toes with his wheeled suitcase, a young man settled into a seat at the adjacent table. It was soon clear that he had consumed rather a lot of alcohol before boarding as he sat down beaming inanely from ear to ear. He proceeded to unpack a large rucksack. The first item to come out was a small electric kettle which he plugged into the computer point. He then knocked the kettle over and soaked the table. Changing his mind about a nice cup of tea he delved back into the rucksack, belched heartily and opened a can of beer. A laptop came out of the bag next quickly followed by a pile of sandwiches and a DVD which he started to play on the laptop. He put headphones on to listen but then asked everyone in the loudest voice imaginable if it was too loud. It wasn’t, he was. Apart from his constant chuckling at his film the rest of the journey was uneventful but the announcement of his stop was pretty late and the scene as he repacked the rucksack with soaking kettle, laptop, soggy sandwiches a couple of hats and his DVD taking each out at least twice and putting them in another section was memorable. As he left he dropped one of his hats and another passenger had to chase after him. Fortunately he was a harmless drunk but if he had been an aggressive one the journey would have been extremely uncomfortable.

So that’s put an end to today’s blog. It’s my birthday today. We’re going to see The Town at the cinema tonight but before then I am going to have to go and work on some accounts at home. Maybe I’ll get a chance to get back to normal when the server is back.