Once upon a time, we thought it would be a great idea if the Bookgrrl household was connected to the NBN. Ballarat is one of the places to be connected and our street already has had the NBN truck in the street ,so we knew we could get connected.
After a couple of phone calls to our ISP, we were booked for connection at the end of April. The work had to be completed by NBN Co, who came up from Melbourne to undertake the connection.
After waiting for nearly an hour for them to arrive, I had a phone call from them asking where I was. At home I replied, a tad perplexed. It turns out they had been working on a property around the corner as their GPS had not been accurate enough. Sometimes it helps to look up and check for road signs, but that’s another story.
While the street was connected, the connections hadn’t been made to each house. The technicians couldn’t do it, as it was another department. No connection.
A few days later, I did notice that contractors had been out to the house, dug up our nature strip and obviously done something to connect us to the NBN connection in the street. A subsequent phone call then had us booked in for the 11th June.
The day finally arrived and Mr BG was to wait for them in the morning. 12pm came and went, with both of us by this stage, slightly cheesed off. Due to the state of the nature strips, the council had refused access to NBN to undertake any work. The issue was that NBN had not informed the ISP nor any of their customers to this. I rang the council and learned that the NBN had been refused access for nearly 3 weeks- hmm…
3rd July, our fingers are crossed! 3 young men turn up, lay a cable underneath the house and connect a tiny little fibre to a hulking big box. It’s done in just over an hour.
Then they say the words- “Um there’s a statewide shortage of batteries (???), and we can’t connect you. We should get them in next week, and we’ll give you a call to make a time to install them. It’ll take about 5 minutes. It’s not our fault, they just didn’t order enough of them”.
I know it’s not they young guy’s personal fault that some desk jockey dickhead in Canberra could not be arsed to add an extra couple of zeros to an order for batteries, and in doing so has affected hundreds of customers, but to have everything connected and then to tell me at the last minute as they’re leaving is kinda cruel. I stifled a whimper and headed to the lounge room to console myself with popcorn and “Back to the Future” with the kids. It’s still as good as what it was in 1985 and Master BG loved it :).
To be continued.
There she goes 