And we’re back

Toy trains and wooden tracks were strewn about on the living room floor. The couch cushions we stacked precariously to make a little cubby house, or as Daniel likes to call it, a “bug house.” A big plastic truck sat in the middle of the hallway. Daniel’s pants were laying on the playroom floor (he likes to take them off). Dishes were piled on the kitchen bench. I only do them once per day, and I hadn’t and that time hadn’t come yet. Crumbs covered parts of the dining table because I didn’t have time to wipe them up before taking Hannah to school.

Daniel in his “bug house.” Rosie loves bug houses too.

At least I was dressed properly when the Telstra guy unexpectedly knocked on my door today though.  Not like the time the mailman knocked on the door when I was brushing my teeth and only wearing a towel. TPG did say that someone would come today, but then we called Optus, and requested to switch carriers. I assumed the Telstra guy wouldn’t come. Even if he did, I didn’t expect him to come inside.  How embarrassing.  Normally it wouldn’t be so bad, but Daniel has bronchitis and wasn’t at daycare today. Or yesterday.  He only goes two days a week.  I let him watch movies all day and even put the train stuff in the living room.  I normally don’t let them bring toys in there.  That’s what the play room (a.k.a. the dining room) is for.

Today was his second day at home all day, and he was feeling much better.  Yesterday he sat on the couch pretty much all day feeling pretty miserable and coughing lots, but today he was jumping around, dumping out toy buckets, making messes, and getting stir crazy in general.  I couldn’t play with him very much though because I have to keep up with my uni work.  The two days that he normally goes to daycare, I do my university stuff.  If I don’t, I’ll fall behind, and there’s no way I’ll be able to catch up.  Not with chemistry.

Needless to say, it was kind of embarrassing letting someone in the house when we were sitting on the couch watching a movie in the middle of the morning (I was watching my lecture on my computer. Daniel was watching a movie as he jumped on the couch and spread trains all over the floor) while the house is a bomb.  Oh well, we have internet now, so I don’t care.

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Copyright 2014 Sheri Thomson

Quest for the internet

Yay, finally the blog is back!! The only reason I didn’t (couldn’t) write it sooner was lack of the Internet. We moved in the middle of April, and have had the worst time getting the Internet since then. You’d think it would be easy to give someone your money in exchange for a service, but, as we have found, it is not.

The quest began when we first moved. Aaron signed up to get Internet with TPG, a provider that for some reason has twice the download limit for half the price, just what we wanted. After a while, they notified Aaron that they could not provide us with the Internet unless we switched our phone line to Telstra. Seemed like a bit of a hassle, so we decided instead to do some research and find someone else to provide us with the Internet. Unfortunately there are not very many providers in this area, so after much thinking, we decided we would in fact switch to Telstra and then get TPG.

I called Telstra, went through all the hoopla needed to sign up to switch to their company, and was told it would be done on or before 2 weeks, and we would get a letter in the mail when it was done letting us know so. So we waited. And waited…and waited…. After 2.5 weeks (I would have called sooner, but was laid up with food poisoning which saw me puking more in 1 day then I have in all my life combined, followed by an injection to stop the puking, and my refusal to ever eat chicken from Chicken Man ever again), I was sufficiently annoyed and phoned Telcrap (I mean Telstra) to find out what was wrong.
“Your application was denied,” I was told.
“Ok, why is that?” I asked them.
“I’m not sure. Do you want me to put the application through again for you?”
“Um, I would like to know why we were denied first. What if we put an application through, wait another 2 weeks, and then find out I was denied again?”
“Oh.”
He gave me another number to call to find out why our application was denied.
“The sales person filled out the wrong form. She filled out the form for a new number, not the form for transferring a number from another provider.” I was told by huffy customer relations officer.
“So why didn’t someone call me and tell me that rather then just letting us wait and wait and wait, thinking the whole time that a phone line will be installed?”
“Sorry, but that was not my department, it was sales. Do you want to put another application through?”
“Would I have to wait another 2 weeks?”
“Yes. It would be like filling out a whole new application, the whole process would start again.”
“So let me get this straight, because your company stuffed up and filled out the wrong form, and then failed to notify me, I have to go through the whole process again even though I should already have a phone line.”
“Um…yeah.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Click. I could feel myself getting flustered, and I really didn’t want to yell at random unsympathetic customer relations dude, especially in front of Hannah, so I just had to hang up. Of course there was no way we were going to switch from Telcrap after that. Seriously, if they said something like “we’re really sorry that happened, if you put in a new application, we will have someone connect your line tomorrow (or even the day after that would have been fine).” But no, that would have been too hard.

The quest began again. Aaron called another Internet supplier only to be told that we’d have to switch to Telcrap. This company, however, actually told us why (if only someone would have told us sooner!!): we have the privilege of having a fibre optic telephone wire. We thought all this time the reason we had to switch to Telcrap was because we had some geriatric decrepit phone line that was incapable of providing broadband/ADSL/ADSL2 Internet. Oh how that changes things! That really only left us with one choice as most companies don’t provide for such high speed fibre optic cables. We had to go with Optus, the provider of said high speed phone line. Yeah, they are more expensive, but you know what? They have wonderful customer service (when I signed up for their Internet, they sent someone 2 days later to connect it and give us the little box thing, and they even told me beforehand what time and day they were sending someone, and they were super friendly and obliging), and the fastest Internet in Australia, so it’s worth it.

Finally, we have the Internet. Insert sigh of relief here.