My neighbours are quiet guys, they work from offices at home. For years they have been complaining that their internet broadband access is not good enough for what they need to do, and that letters and phone calls to the appropriate provider achieved nothing except the statement that we weren’t an area of the city due to have the new fibre optic broadband for some time. They bonded over their shared grievance at the summer street barbeque and Christmas mulled wine. But a hole has now appeared in the road and the spirit of shared grievance has evaporated.
- Hole in the road
(No matter how high tech our lives there will always be men digging holes in the road)
The hole is there because our neighbour [the architect] has been offered a trial ‘fibre to curb’ package, and the new cables are being run to his house. To make matter worse he has been offered payment by the provider to be a tester of the technology- while everyone else watches green with envy – unable even to pay for the same privilege. To say that his erstwhile friendly neighbours [the IT consultant and the accountant] are not happy is an understatement. Our architect neighbour is taking great care, he remembers the fate of the protagonist of Bernard Cribbins song about the hole:
Well there we were, discussing this hole
Hole in the groud so big and sort of round it was
It’s not there now, the ground’s all flat
And beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat
It’s not often that someone complains that the road outside their house isn’t being dug up, but I feel your pain. Where I work we have BT broadband, on a 7MBs maximum download speed. In today’s standards I may as well draw websites by hand rather than try to access them.