This poor old phone box has certainly seen better days. It stands in our village centre and I suspect its use each year could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand! I heard a news item a few weeks back that I can’t locate now that talked about how infrequently many rural boxes are and I think this would be a competitor for the least often.

It’s really here because I thought it made a “nice” image to tell a sorry tale of our phone system. We recently changed our phone and internet provider, partly because we got a deal with 6 months free, always a boon in a tight budget, and partly because we wanted access to the dreaded BTSport. It’s been an unmitigated disaster. DM goes puce every time we hear their name.

Our broadband speed has dropped to about ¼ of what it was with our previous provider. A close look at the small print of the new contract reveals it’s nowhere near as free as we thought. The service is rubbish – call centres in places where English isn’t a first language so the engineers can’t converse in engineer speak with DM. Add to that the fact that our phone died for two days directly because of something a BT service engineer had told us to do so we were incommunicado at a time when we need to have good contact with the outside world. I looked at my emails to find a whole batch of increasingly frantic emails that I found too late to respond to (after business hours).

All-in-all, we’re deeply regretting our move to BT and wish against wish that we’d not been unfaithful to our “good honest broadband from Yorkshire” who we miss desperately. It’s a salutary lesson in “we’ve made our bed and now we have to lie in it, whether we want to or not”. I suppose it’s a bit like waking up after a night wearing beer goggles to find yourself next to Godzilla…not something we’d wish on our worst energy.