Tag: Skype

Mommie Dearest

The day after we moved into our ancient gaff, a nice man called Richard  from Virgin Media (not the Richard, obviously) installed our all singing, all dancing multimedia techno-wizardry – 30 megabyte fibre-optic broadband, telephone line and high definition TV. The whole compendium was half price for six months and came with free installation, free equipment and free weekend calls. We now have more channels of crap than you can shake a stick at. Currently, I’m being forced to watch wall-to-wall Olympics (Liam’s current obsession). We’ve never had HD TV before. I can see every wrinkle, every blemish, every spot and every blackhead on the faces of the famous – except for Gary Lineker (who surely must have had a nick and lift). No wonder an old bundle of ageing TV presenters decided to hang up their auto-cues and throw in the flannel: there are some things even the thickest slap can’t hide. Now we have free weekend calls, they’ll be no more Sunday Skype calls to mother. Just as well. I could never get the bloody thing to work properly from Turkey anyway and the compulsory weekly check-in was always a painful exercise, invariably ending in complete frustration.

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Houston, We Have a Problem

Whore’s Drawers

The unreliability of our ADSL is becoming a major irritant. It’s been up and down like whore’s drawers of late and even when it’s up it’s like a slow foxtrot. TTNET blamed it on the quality of our telephone line. They have a point. All we get is lots of crackling. It’s astonishing just how completely reliant we now are on the internet not just for my irrelevant irreverent dispatches but more importantly for banking and fund watching to dodge insolvency. Not to mention keeping in touch with loved ones in Blighty via email and Skype. It’s our small but vital window on the World. We ordered in a swarthy Turk with ample tools to fiddle with our wires in exchange for cash. He sorted us out. For now.