17 Visitors, the eBay Purchase from Hell, and the Return of the Internet!

My Internet has come back up after six-and-a-half days of outage. The words of wisdom from Orange technical support were "There's nothing we can do, if the service does not come back within 10 days, get back to us" !!!!!!!!!!!!!! It feels like I have been to hell and back many times over the last week. The problem was that by tweaking with the ADSL modem's settings, I could sometimes get Internet at 55 kbits - though not reliably. There was a lot of failed tweaking and a lot of wasted time.


Anyhow, to celebrate the InterNet coming back a brief blog entry for yesterday!


I had 17 visitors in total:

• 1 plumber
• 1 builder
• 6 members of a local family (including relatives on holiday from Holland)
• 7 Slovakian fruit pickets who arrived on 7 push bikes
• 2 lady police officers late at night

Only the builder and plumber were expected. I am teetering on the edge of having a working bathroom - it's getting quite exciting.

The police officers were somewhat alarming, but as soon as they mentioned Arbroath I had an inkling. I recently bought a TV from Arbroath off eBay - only the TV received had a much lower specification  than the TV advertised. And geeks like me know precisely what features we are going for and which models have these and which models do not! :-) I contacted the seller about the misrepresentation, suggesting some resolutions, and was immediately accused of lying about the misrepresentation; stealing her TV; not paying any money and threatened with the police! So this accounted for the visit. All I could do was tell the police that I had documentary evidence that everything the seller was saying was false, and indeed had sent this documentary evidence to the seller. I had already taken the mis-selling to the eBay resolution centre, to get an independent judgement this way.

Anyhow, although it was dark when the lady police officers arrived, they had mighty powerful torches so I could take them for a tour of the castle in the dark. :-)

So the castle does make one speculate on the nature of humanity. The visitors today were absolutely lovely - I only wish I had had some notice so I could have baked some scones or something. Indeed, I did precisely that later in the day out of consequent guilt! This contrasts totally with the "eBay purchase from hell" as just described - one never expects clicking the "BUY" button to result in a police visit. I will not pass any judgement on the individual concerned, but will report back on the outcome of the eBay resolution.