Hot on the heels of the aggressive letters from the charming folks at the TV Licencing Authorities comes the latest beaurocratic stuff up from your friends at BT.

Our friends may have wondered why it took so long for us to communicate our new phone number – after all we applied over 5 weeks ago. Well the reason is because we were only finally connected on Saturday. On applying, BT asked all sorts of questions and did seem to struggle with our address and whether there had been a phone there before – there had. Eventually we were told the line was fine and we were connected.

Then they said we weren’t and that they would need to send an engineer down so could we please wait at the house. Not entirely convenient with Shivs in HK and me in London, but we arranged for someone to be there. She waited 5 hours and they didn’t show. Then they called to say they did not need to visit. Thanks. So all was OK.

No it wasn’t, as when we moved in on Wednesday there was no connection. I called the ubiquitous computerized helpline (one for the top ten list of things I really dislike) and eventually an apologetic but resolutely unhelpful lady said an engineer would be out on Saturday. I related our experiences to-date but she remained unmoved and unhelpful. Her manager took the same line so I gave up and hung up.

The repair engineer turned up late on Friday and was very helpful. He was searching for a break in the cable as he had been advised that was the problem. He came back on Saturday and after much searching found no break, only that the wires had not been joined at some junction box down the road… i.e. we simply had not been connected. Five minutes later and we were sorted.

So, what was a simple 5 minute connection job was screwed up so much that it took us 5 weeks and a day of an engineer and his mates time to fix – a job should have been done by the ordinary connection engineer.

Pathetic.