Over to Gordon & Patricia's place to set up their new computer today. Daisy comes with me a she's absolutely fascinated by their garden, spending a good hour exploring it this morning even though it's raining and she normally hates the rain.
The computer setup goes fine - with a very, very nice Dell UltraSharp 17" TFT monitor, yum - but the ISDN lines still aren't working.
Instead of 1016, which still isn't staffed, I try 1013, the general fault-reporting number. They transfer me to the ISDN line specialists who put me on to 1015. Ah, says 1015, we can't deal with that here - you need to go into a France Telecom office.
So we have a little lunch - mostly strawberries, they're just coming into season now - and head up to the nearest office in Uzès. Which doesn't deal with stuff like this, they just sell handsets.
On to Alès, then. The young lady on the reception desk takes the details and invites me to take a seat and wait - and wait, and wait. 45 minutes later the person in the queue in front of me, who'd already been waiting 15 minutes when I arrived, got called. The young lady behind the reception desk takes pity on me and says she'll deal with my problem personally. So I explain all the details to her again - whereupon she says that, ah, we can't deal with that sort of thing here you need to telephone 1015.
At which point I did lose it slightly, I should confess. Well, OK, I went bonkers and swore at her for a good minute in English. Unfortunately that didn't make her any more willing to help, although she did give me a phone and say I could call 1015 from there.
Which I did. No, they still can't help although this person equally can't imagine why on earth their colleague earlier advised me to drive for an hour and then sit in a France Telecom office for another hour, any fule kno that FT offices don't deal with these problems.
No, what Monsieur needs to do is dial 0800 015 051, they are the specialist ISDN experts.
So I dial 0800 015 051. Who, this being three minutes past five, have now gone for the day.
Quite how I managed to avoid throwing the handset through the young lady's PC screen and then inviting her to jam the entire office up her bum, I do not know. I did, I admit, bang the handset down rather loudly on the desk but all I did then was walk out. I could have spent another five minutes haranguing her, explaining that she could have told me when I first explained the problem to her that she couldn't help, but no. That would have been a waste of my life so I just left.
I'm so proud of me.