The blackout tale continues. As I wrote last week, the blackout in my local area fried my computer’s hard drive. It may also have damaged my NBN connection. In any event, my internet went into buffering mode last Saturday morning as did my TV. Those days of climbing onto the roof to check one’s aerial are long gone. The light on my modem was blue not the required green. My NBN box was not talking to my Telstra modem. This started a long drawn-out painfully frustrating process.

I called Telstra. Once through, I was told robotically that it would be forty plus minutes before someone could speak to me unless I pressed 2, in which case someone from their international team would get back to me within 15 minutes. By international team, they meant someone from India whose accent often challenges my comprehension. Lots of sorry(s) what did you say?

And so it began. In all, five separate phone conversations, including one from Desmond in Perth, the rest (one guy three gals) from India. One pleasant Indian lady who I engaged in conversation said that she was in Ahmedabad, I think, could have misheard her, might have been somewhere else. Anyway, she said the weather was too hot.

They all tried to help. No complaints there. But they all asked me to do exactly the same thing over and over again, despite me saying that I had already tried that. Unplug the modem and NBN box, press the reset buttons, disconnect the ethernet cable from the modem and connect it to your computer and check the download speed, and so on. Incidentally, by tiny laptop doesn’t have an ethernet port so I had to move my desktop closer to the NBN box in order to check the download speed. Oh, and I was asked at one point, having explained that my laptop did not have the required port: have you got an ethernet adaptor? Yes, in my back pocket – I didn’t say, because throughout it all I remained stoically polite. Alright, I admit, maybe my stoicism fell away in the end.

Penultimately, an Indian lady on the other end of the phone said, it is your ethernet cable. The NBN box is working. The modem is working. Therefore, she said with impeccable logic, it is your cable connecting the two. You need to buy another cable. Are you sure, I asked. Yes, I am, she said with absolute assurance. This was Sunday evening at this stage, about 30 hours since I had made the first call. OK, I said, I will buy one tomorrow can you please call me back on Tuesday after 2.30 pm; I had things to do in the morning. Yes, she said.

I went to Officeworks on my way to my gym in the city to buy a new ethernet cable. We only have one 25 metres long; the chap told me. Why, I asked plaintively? I think we are changing brands, he said, and the new ones aren’t in yet. I went around the corner to a Mitre 10 store and sure enough they had cables in various sizes, including one just one metre long. Good! When back home, I connected it. Alas, still a blue light, not the magic green light.

I should have said that Telstra put me on a 4G data backup in the interim, which worked but which leads me to question their claim that their modem provides adequate backup in normal circumstances when NBN fails. It clearly doesn’t, at least until you go through the onerous process of calling them.

Another Indian lady called me on Tuesday as arranged. I explained the situation, that the new cable had not worked. Unbelievably she wanted me to do again all of the switching on and off things, etc., that I had previously done multiple times. I admit at this point to ever so slightly losing my presence of mind. I need a technician to come around, I am too old for this, I whimpered.

She succumbed to my desperation and made an appointment for an NBN technician to come around next day, on the Wednesday afternoon. He duly arrived and spent around two hours at least replacing my NBN box and upgrading my connection. It simply wasn’t working properly even though the lights on the NBN box seemed to indicate that it was. Nothing that I could have done, switching things on and off, changing cables, etc., had any chance of fixing the problem. What was needed was a cable guy.

We have built ourselves smart systems. Unfortunately when they go wrong, we have not matched the systems with smart remedial processes. One phone call answered by someone with good English, armed with a standard testing protocol, should be sufficient to determine the need or not for a cable guy.

Why is it these days that we live in fear of having to sort out a problem with those who provide us with a service, for which we pay handsomely? I would like Mr Trump to fix this, in his spare time.