Tuesday 21 December 2010

sky, virgin, bt, talktalk

Is it at least possible that broadband, and internet in general, is a sort of magical technology which has been developed incredibly quickly and that it is not at all easy to provide, and on the whole these companies do it well, but there are lots of things that can go wrong, and when they do they are not very simple to fix unless you really know what you are doing?

I appreciate that they might sell the thing differently - they might say: look, you might be lucky, we have a system which very often works and is like magic but sometimes things go wrong and it could be one of loads of things, most of which are your fault because you're even more inexpert than even our most inexpert engineers. Or they could employ better people. We would have to pay more then, though. That tends to cause a fuss.

And of course it's frustrating for us, because we depend on the magic, like it's electricity or water, but it is fundamentally more complicated to deliver in a working fashion than electricity or water, or the phone, and unlike them it's been around for six hours.

I'm really not saying it's not frustrating. I've been very frustrated by it. But it is also, sort of, like magic. And it's part of the whole, in general, people forgetting that the internet is an amazing piece of engineering, made of real stuff, that is hard to maintain and costs a lot of money.

This was today's bathtime thought. Usually I read.

1 comment:

Dianne said...

I know exactly what you mean. My internet kept dropping out every 5 minutes or so on the weekend. In between the yelling and frustration, I couldn't also help but think how I was being annoyed over a rather minor blip in an otherwise amazing invention. It's one of those things you don't appreciate until you can't have it. I don't know what it was, but it's working fine now. To me it's in the same category as the other magic things I don't understand, like TV and aeroplanes.

I feel a bit like an intruder here, so sorry if this commenting isn't wanted! If it's any justification, I have your book and I'm gonna start reading it as soon as I can drag myself away from the internet long enough...