{"id":752,"date":"2004-05-08T21:44:35","date_gmt":"2004-05-08T21:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/brilliant-talent\/"},"modified":"2004-05-08T21:44:35","modified_gmt":"2004-05-08T21:44:35","slug":"brilliant-talent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/brilliant-talent\/","title":{"rendered":"Brilliant Talent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Trying to face a weekend without IP was enough to keep me awake last night. As soon as I surfaced I got on to 151. Their automated service let me know that the problem we still had, had been resolved, so I phoned back. BTW &#8211; don&#8217;t bother with their convenient &#8220;call back&#8221; service &#8211; it sucks and is still slower than waiting on hold (hey it&#8217;s an 0800).<\/p>\n<p>When I initially reported the fault, I cried down the phone and told the poor sod about how I was likely to commit suicide and take some people with me. Evidently he made a note on my record because when I called again, the woman I spoke to treated me like she was working for the samaritans. She even told me that &#8220;If I could personally climb telephone poles I would &#8211; I&#8217;m so sorry&#8221;. Not only that, but within 20 minutes we had an engineer here! On a saturday! The poor bastard ended up spending 2 hours tracing our line from the hole in the wall right back to the exchange using his little osc\/amp setup. Every manhole inbetween had to be taken up and it turned out to be down to the engineer who installed the line in the first place&#8230;who forgot to tell the exchange that he&#8217;d re-routed the line to another pair&#8230;nice bloke, but what a twat.<br \/>\nHowever, I have to say that getting everything back in order within 2 hours of making a call really does make me feel better about the UK and really makes me want to give &#8220;Helen&#8221; in cutomer services a great big passionate kiss. Thanks Helen.<\/p>\n<p>Once the saviour had got us all back up, Michele and I went to Moonbow Jakes in Brockley to see Alex&#8230;who is about to go to Mexico for ever and ever&#8230;I have to say  that it was one of the best afternoons I&#8217;ve had for years. We got to meet lots of people who all turned out to be really sound, lovely people. Been a while since I  met <i>anyone<\/i> who I really liked, and today there were fucking millions of them! Nice one Alex &#8211; we&#8217;re all going to miss you.<\/p>\n<p>We got home, appreciated Humph, ordered a curry and then watched Abigail&#8217;s Party (as a result of an earlier conversation). What a piece of brilliance that play is. It gets more difficult to watch each time and yet every  actor becomes more accurate. It brought back old memories &#8211; <i>Stacey and Ash &#8211; please get in touch<\/i> &#8211; I miss you both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trying to face a weekend without IP was enough to keep me awake last night. As soon as I surfaced I got on to 151. Their automated service let me know that the problem we still had, had been resolved, so I phoned back. BTW &#8211; don&#8217;t bother with their convenient &#8220;call back&#8221; service &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}