Opinion: Feeling connected with a crackle-free landline
© Kathy Horniblow The early-morning walk from my bedroom in the south wing to the kitchen in the east wing has, for the past few weeks, been interrupted by a small detour.
Just after coming down the green stairs into the hall, I head over to the old front door (not used since 1879) and pick up the nearby telephone. I press 1 – and listen. And then enjoy the silence.
It hasn’t always been like this.
For three years, we’ve been battling with “noise on the line”. Some days it would pop and hiss, some days it would be like the cast of Riverdance after 10 pints of Guinness on a stage covered in ball bearings.
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And because our internet plugs into the same “line”, what little online work we do was hampered as the router dropped in and out and generally sulked.
It was a nuisance for Hazel and her accounting work, and for me and online book sales – but when the children were home with their gadgets, the complaints got a lot louder.
I tried to explain that the exchange is miles away, and the line was probably laid down by the Romans, but they would insist that something is done. An intermittent 1.2 megathingies per second is just not on.
I explained this to a long-distance gentleman at BT, who blamed our router. So I talked it through with Fleur, our internet provider.
They blamed Openreach, who said they’d send out an engineer, but it’ll be £240 if it’s not their fault.
For the best part of 36 months, this unholy triangle of blame has raged back and forth.
We’ve had a stream of Openreach engineers, some of them charming and friendly, some of them doom-laden tooth-suckers.
On their advice we’ve changed the phone, the router and the thingummy filter, and disconnected the extension that routes calls to my office.
They’ve been up poles, down manholes, into hedges and through the trees. We’ve learned to be on guard for the email saying we’ve been charged £240, even though the latest engineer has agreed it’s not our fault.
The most bizarre thing is that the line would improve for a few weeks, but then, one morning, it would be like a biscuit tin in a hailstorm, and we’d start all over again.
We postulated that the local exchange has only five working connections, and he who shouts latest and loudest gets connected to one of them – and someone else gets disconnected.
On one of the days that the internet was working, I took to X/Twitter: we’d had an email saying that a fault that was due to be investigated the next day had been sorted and closed, so I congratulated them on their warp in the space-time continuum.
This hit a nerve. We had urgent contact from Scotland, and some wonderfully honest engineers arrived (“yup, all the old exchanges are knackered, and we’re nicking parts from Guildford!”) but after half a day, the line suddenly improved.
We soared to 6.8 megathingies per second and the “noise” vanished. They arrived in the yard with a huge grin. I asked what they’d done. “We found a spare line.” Simple as that.
That was a month ago, and – whisper it gently – our phone is still crackle-free. It’s a shame the landline is used as often as the front door these days.