The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why

We are huddled around two candles, instinctively leaning into the light like moths. (What do you mean “moths can’t lean"? Ever seen one fall over?) All around us is darkness and chill.

I ask if my neighbours, whose house this is, would mind if I use their toilet. I totter precariously upstairs, lighting my way with the torch on my mobile phone. Then comes the real problem: finding somewhere to lean the handset (one might say moth-like) so that enough light illuminates the, ahem, general target area without toppling into the bowl.

Of course it’s while subsequently washing my hands that the handset imperceptibly slips backwards on the soapy porcelain and slithers into the half-filled washbasin with a sickening plop. Plunged into pitch blackness, I retrieve my submerged phone by groping around where I remember it was last seen.

I dry my phone and hands on something that feels like a towel but could be the curtains for all I know. As I draw it towards me, I hear a strange noise as if five toilet rolls were dropping one by one into water – what could it be? A mystery for sure. Then I nudge myself an inch at a time towards where I think the top of the staircase used to be. I descend the stairs backwards on all fours to rejoin my friends just as one of the candles fizzles out.

This is especially annoying as it’s a warm and brilliantly sunny morning.

We are undergoing a power cut down our street. So I was a little surprised when our neighbours knocked on the door asking to borrow some candles. During the daytime.

Unfortunately, his colleagues at work had convinced him a month earlier to install a variety of smart home gadgets. One of these was electrically operated rolling window shutters that open and close by using a remote control. Of course when he awoke that morning to find there was a power cut, he couldn’t open the shutters.

Three hours later, still without current, while the rest of us are enjoying the best of the Mediterranean winter sun streaming through our windows, the interior of his house is like a Vantablack showroom.

With the topic of power cuts high on the media agenda, I remembered that I had written something about getting disconnected not so long ago. I searched for the article on my still-damp mobile phone to show my neighbour, which he politely pretended to read despite not understanding a word. He did, however, remark on how nice my phone smelled.

With a few edits, here is that very column, reproduced here for your reading pleasure (and my writing leisure)…

Bzzz. The number of the incoming call is “Unknown”. I reject it, obviously. While I am intrigued by the idea of receiving mystery calls from The Unknown, they are disappointing to answer.

Bzzz. This guy’s insistent: it’s the fourth time he’s tried to call in the last minute. He must really want me to install that new kitchen / swimming pool / solar panels / conservatory / sheep farm / fibre broadband / large hadron collider.

Hang on. Fibre broadband… that rings a bell.

My doorbell rings. On the doorstep is an impatient broadband engineer holding a mobile phone with “Call rejected x 4” on its screen. I love it when idioms go literal.

He has come to look at my connection because there is a fault. I don’t have time for this: I have an imminent appointment for something or other coming up in my calendar. As if to prove it, I instinctively wake up my smartphone to show him, trying to act casually as I swipe away the “Reject call x 4” notification. See? I have an appointment right now.

It reads: “Broadband engineer visit.”

Ah yes, it’s all coming back to me. I had settled down to watch the final match of the postponed Euro 2020 football tournament on Sunday night and my cable TV service froze at the moment of kickoff. Well of course it did. I am used to this. My cable TV service delivers 900 channels of unwanted reality shite 24 hours a day in UHD without a glitch, but on the fleetingly rare occasions when I might actually want to watch something that interests me, it goes TITSUP*. It’s all part of the game of life.

Sod’s Law demands a prescribed process before arriving at an out-of-court settlement. First you have to restart your set-top box; when this doesn’t work (it won’t), you restart your router AND your set-top box; when this doesn’t work (it won’t), you switch off both your router and set-top box and disconnect the cables and wait for two minutes before reconnecting and restarting; and so on.

I eventually brought the TV stream back to life by switching off and disconnecting everything, turning out the lights, leaving the cold tap in the kitchen sink running, turning around three times while repeating the words “sempiternal acquiescent” aloud, stepping outside, locking my front door, unlocking my front door again, going back inside, turning around three times in the opposite direction while repeating “ornithological redamancy”, stopping the running tap, turning the lights back on, and reconnecting and restarting everything.

I actually had to do this twice as first time round I accidentally got the “turning out the lights” and “leaving the cold tap running” steps in the wrong order.

Ah, home fibre broadband. The service that’s open to all.

Doing all of this at least salvaged enough miserable bandwidth to witness the second half of the match in SD, plus extra time and even the England team’s long-term contractual obligation to lose on penalties. Luckily, my team had already beaten Germany a week earlier, so I was spared from having to watch either of the team managers indulge in Touchline Scratch-and-Sniff. That kind of thing really puts me off my beer and Doritos.

On one of the two occasions while I was momentarily standing outside my own front door that night, some passersby looked suspiciously in my direction, so I pretended to be checking my smartphone for something that would validate my reasons for loitering on a doorstep while wearing pyjamas.

Brainwave. I decided to take the opportunity to report the loss of service to my fibre broadband provider via the wonders of 4G. I accepted the automatically assigned engineer appointment three days’ hence, and promptly forgot all about it somewhere between the latter part of extra time and Marcus Rashford’s dazzlingly improvised Riverdance during the penalty shootout.

Before that, the last time I sat down in front of the TV just to watch a sports final was for the Six Nations rugby competition in March. A mere three seconds into that match, the TV went blank. To be fair to my broadband provider, so did the lights and all other electrical devices throughout the house, and indeed the neighbouring streets.

I ended up watching the remainder of that match on my smartphone. I know da kidz prefer to watch movies and stuff that way, but not me. You lose some of the grandeur of a major sporting occasion when part of the chilli tortilla chip you’re munching falls onto the screen and obscures half the playing field.

While I was thrilling at the sight of 30 tiny men battling over the one-millimetre ball on my smartphone, Mme D phoned the electricity company to ask when the power would be restored. They thanked her for letting them know there had been a power cut.

“Glad to be of service,” she said. “Contact me if you need further assistance, quoting the code YU55L355BGGR5."

The power came back the moment the referee blew the final whistle.

Right now, though, the broadband engineer has finished resetting the line at the wall and my lovely personal two-way gigabit per second is restored. As he leaves, I ask him if the problem was due to something I had done.

“No.”

Did you have to replace any connectors or cabling? “No.”

Was there a local dropout at the provider? “No.”

So what caused it? “Dunno.”

That’s the problem with technicians: they try to fob you off with jargon.

I am reminded of the two occasions when I booked an appointment with my water company to fit a water meter. Both times they sent a contractor who asked me whereabouts the supply pipe entered the house. I told them I had no idea. Didn’t they know? Apparently not. So on both occasions they left without doing anything.

It was only later that I wondered what would have happened if I stopped paying my water bill. They’d send someone over to my house to cut me off, I imagine. They would ask me where the supply pipe entered the house. I would tell them, truthfully, that I still have no idea. Neither would they, of course, so they’d just have to leave, their grim task unfulfilled, and leaving me with free water forever.

Another part of the game of life, I suppose.

Still, my cable TV’s all sorted now. So I give you fair warning: if you hear about an earthquake, tsunami or aeroplane crash in my neck of the woods, it’ll be because I’m trying to watch the Olympics.

* Television In Total Suspension – Unavailable Picture