Saturday, January 21, 2012

questions remain

The things that happened this week in relation to the story that I'm telling didn't follow the conventions of logic, leaving me baffled as much as the story has baffled me since it started more than five weeks ago. But it has now reached a conclusion. I made a few more calls to the Orange call center in Belfast and received a few from them. I was surprised that up until the end, there were still people that I hadn't talked to. The call center must be a sizeable operation.

Last week, the state of things was that there was something wrong with my phone line, that the fault was external and that an engineer would have to come by to fix it. Things had, in other words, not moved since the first engineer had come to my flat a month earlier, a time that can be called, with some dramatic flourish yet accurately, last year.

As the fault was external, the engineer wouldn't need access to my flat. Hearing this came as a relief. After all, I had waited for an engineer in vain twice before. But I knew that my relief was of the religious kind. It flew in the face of observable facts. Yet I clung to it.

On Wednesday, I got a call from an engineer who told me rather cheerfully that my fault was very nearly fixed. In fact, it might possibly be fixed already, and would I mind letting him in to verify that? I was at work; it was the early afternoon. "I'll see you in half an hour", I replied, not wanting to give him the chance to miss another appointment, and rushed home through dense sheets of drizzle.

Every now and then, I complain about work in acadmic research. Sometimes I get profoundly disenchanted. Jobs are precarious for the most part. Instead of building cohesive and efficient units, it is universal policy to drive staff out after a few years. Pay is low relative to qualifications. But there are undeniable benefits to this line of work as well. Freedom is treasured highly. I have my own projects and organize my efforts and time to my own best judgment. If something more important than work comes up, it can take immediate priority, currently running experiments permitting. The time missed in one part of the day can simply be made up for later. This flexibility might even be beneficial to the outcome of work because experiments often involve periods of waiting and can extend beyond the eight hours of a working day.

At home, I still didn't have a dial tone, and two-and-a-half hours later, when night had fallen and nine-to-fivers pack up and go home, the engineer told me he'd have to be back to finish the next day. "There's no need for you to be here. I'll call you when everything is done."

The next morning, the London winter drizzle from the day before was gone, replace by hard rain from low clouds that looked bottomless. The engineer looked miserable as he lifted the cover from one of the cable jointing manholes, bracing himself for a day in the trenches of hard work as I was off to a dry though occasionally rather smelly lab.

That night, my landline was restored. I had a dial tone and could make calls. The internet was back as well. I called Orange, partly to report the successful completion of the work and partly to say goodbye to a group of people that had become an ersatz social network to me. After all, I had spent more time with them than with my family since my phone went down. It hadn't registered.

"Are you sure you are with Orange", the lady on the phone asked me when I had given her my phone number and a bucketful of personal details for security purposes. I almost cried, it was so cruel. But I managed to convince her and close the case. Or so I thought. The next morning, I got a call from a familiar voice, Ashling enquiring about the status of my phone line. My problem might be fixed, but chaos still reigns at Orange.

At least my phone's working. I'm happy about that, obviously, but I'm inordinately happier that I don't have to deal with this anymore. It wasn't a battle taking strength and determination, it was a war of attrition where nothing I did seemed to make the least difference, and it was just by pure chance that I got my way. The call center worker were friendly without fail, but I never got even a single word of apology.

1 comment:

Dee said...

wow, this has taken long enough.