End of the Line

 Our broadband contract ends next week so it was time for Lord Malarkey to conduct his biennial battle with the internet providers in order to negotiate a new deal for the next two years. I couldn’t do it because I am NOT the main account holder (probably because I am ‘the woman’ 🙄) and they refuse to deal with anyone who is NOT the main account holder even though I am named on the account. 

Anyway, Lord Malarkey’s first port of call was the ‘useful’ app service run by some idiot AI chatbot, which turned out to be not useful at all because it didn’t understand that we wanted to terminate the landline part of our contract and kept sending us round in useless, ever decreasing circles. Eventually, after his eyeballs had pretty much rolled out of his head, Lord M got through to a real live person and everything went fairly okay after that.

Yes, after decades of having a telephone land line (because that’s how telephoning began and that’s all you had and it became part of your life) we decided that we don’t really use ours anymore and it was £10 a month we could save and spend on biscuits instead. All we get are spam calls, anyway, from the low-life scammer types telling us we have a security breach on our computers in their attempt to hack into our bank and steal all our money, or irritating types trying to sell us home energy efficient shite which will lead to an infestation of black mould because they don’t understand that old houses like ours need to breathe, not be suffocated. And I am becoming bored with telling off scammers - ‘We both know you’re a scammer, but does your mother? - and pretending that I’m not the homeowner at all, but a squatter who is growing cannabis in the attic. 

As time went by, we maintained the landline for emergency power cut use, because if the electricity went off, at least we could plug in our analogue phone and have a means of communication. However, British Telecom scuppered that plan a few years ago by switching us to a digital line without telling us, so the analogue emergency phone no longer worked. Ironically, the broadband lady Lord M spoke to this morning asked what means we had to call emergency services if we didn’t have a landline. He said something about us both having mobile phones, and I was thinking, yes, but if the internet goes off, mine only really works at the top of the garden, and I made a note that if I was having a heart attack or I severed an artery whilst chopping up a butternut squash, I must remember to drag myself up the garden so I could call an ambulance before I passed out. And if I DON’T make it, and die en route to a phone signal, then British Telecom had better watch out because I’ll be back to haunt them. 

I digress…

Poor Lord Malarkey had to sit through the broadband lady’s sales pitch. She dealt with the getting rid of the landline bit very promptly, and she offered us a continuation of our current broadband package for £10 a month less than it currently is (I don’t know how or why this happens but it is my opinion that ALL internet providers are scammers, too). Of course, the monthly cost will rise in April as it does every year regardless of anything sane or reasonable, but it was ever thus with all providers. Still, after all was agreed, we will save around £200 a year which equates to many biscuits. 

But did the broadband lady leave it at that? Did she recognise that she had done her job and fulfilled our request, and the correct thing to do now was to say, ‘Thank you for your continued custom, have a nice day, goodbye’? No, she did not. She continued. She tried to sell us an upgrade on the broadband package. She tried to sell us mobile phone contracts. She tried to sell us iPads and i-phones. She tried to sell us various other digital packages. They say God loves a trier, and goodness but she tried. But we had the Devil on our side, and the Devil knew we’d got what we wanted and weren’t going to be seduced into buying shiny internet fripperies, and what we REALLY wanted was to be left to eat our beans on toast in peace. 

It was all good humoured though, and the broadband lady was a jolly sort who was only following the script as part of her job, and we’ve all had to jump ropes and go through hoops like that, haven’t we? We all know what it’s like to have to tick the box in order to be paid. 

I said to Lord M, once he’d breathed a sigh of relief that his ordeal was over for another two years, that in twenty years, when I am an elderly lady who would be sent into a state of confusion and near panic at having to negotiate a call like that, I would hope that the Internet would have exploded and we’d all be back in the good old pre-digital days of communicating properly with people on proper telephones again. He said he very much doubted this would happen. I remain hopeful. 

Farewell then, telephone landline. It was good whilst it lasted. Or at least, until the scammers arrived.