August 31, 2007

I am happy to announce that G in all his perseverance finally won out over the horribly inept BT staff and managed to get a phone line! Seriously, every time he called no one seemed to know which department could set up an account. But now we have a phone! I don’t recommend calling it unless there’s an emergency, but hey, at least you can call now if there is one. Speaking of which, here is our info:

G’s office number: ( 4am-1pm EST) 01223-326-737

G’s cell phone: 07979-998-312

Our home phone: 01954-232-006

G has a cell phone now- he bought a barely used one off ebay.uk, and amazingly enough it came 2 days later! I guess the Royal Mail is moving faster without the strike. :) His phone is something else- it’s a Sony Walkman phone, so it has an mp3 player in it, it has some PDF functionality (including checking email and going on the internet) and some other cool stuff that I don’t even know about yet. That email checking feature was great today when G needed to see if his advisor had emailed him regarding this paper he’s submitting on Tuesday, and instead of having to drive 15 minutes in to G’s office he just checked it right here! I’m not one for gadgety phones, but I have to admit that that feature has caught my eye. I’ve always just had a plain old phone, but since it’s against the law to hold the phone handset while driving you need Bluetooth if you want to use the phone in the car. Given how many times I call G because I got detoured (which they call a Diversion here) and am lost, I think I’ll be getting a Bluetooth enabled phone.

So I have the funniest story in the world to tell everyone. When I heard this I laughed so hard for about 20 minutes. As you know, BT turned our phone on yesterday. We lost no time in choosing an internet provider, Virgin. I went in with G and checked some email quickly and then went to do some errands and get some cross stitch supplies (more on that later) in Willingham. When I got home it was about 4pm, and the first thing I did was check to see if the phone was working- they have a funny phone jack here so I had to get a special cord to plug it in. Anyway, I called G’s office as a test, and it worked! He told me that he had just set things up with Virgin for our DSL and internet service stuff, and had just tried to call the house phone to see if it was working. When he tried to call, it rang (which he considered a good sign) and then suddenly a male voice picked up the phone and said “Swavesey Garage.” At which point, G was like “Uhh, I think I called the wrong number.” He checked, and he has a little pad of paper with important numbers on it, none of which are apparently labeled. :) But it gets better- he didn’t just call the Swavesey Garage number thinking it was our home phone line, but he had actually given that same phone number to Virgin to set up our DSL on! When he realized this he had to call Virgin back and get them to re-do the account set up (of course the account is linked to your phone number) and then also call the router people that he ordered a router through (which is somehow linked to Virgin) and cancel the order before they sent our router to Swavesey Garage. :) We’ve taken the car down there twice, and we’re Americans (and I had a good long conversation with the mechanic regarding our cooling fan and a special reroute he had to do on it due to a burned out switch) so I know they would remember us. Imagine if one day they received a package with our name on it with a router in it? How embarrassing! Or if Virgin called asking for G! I just couldn’t believe it.