Telephony

I had been planning to organise setting up the phone service for the flat this weekend, but seeing as there was no point in delaying it (particularly as Whitney needs a number to put on her job applications) I phoned up the BT help line this lunchtime.

Incidentally, I've been looking at the phone and broadband services available and I've decided that the best thing for us is to get the line from BT (£10.50 a month) and combined phone and broadband service from Tiscali (£16 on top of that, 4GB limit a month, 2Mbps bandwidth, free UK weekend phone calls, guaranteed all calls cheaper than BT, billions of other things). If you can think of a better one, please stop me as soon as possible.

A lot of the convenience of setting it up relied on the presence of a BT line in the flat, which I was fairly sure we had. John from BT chose to phrase my real situation in the most disappointing way possible. "Your flat does have an existing BT line", he said, pausing gigantically and allowing me to get my hopes up, "but it's been physically disconnected." So an engineer will have to be sent out to it at a time when we're in and reconnect the phone line. At the moment it's unclear whether this will involve the substantial £70 reconnection fee or not - BT is decidedly uncertain and says that "We may have to charge you for additional costs depending on how much work is required." Maybe if we ply them with enough cups of tea while they're down there it'll all balance out.