The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 20, 2012

Official News page 1


BACK AT LAST!

by Hazed

The Fed2 Star is back - a week later than planned.

We had a scheduled break two weeks ago (it was a holiday weekend in the UK) but should have published last week. However, technical problems prevented your favorite newspaper from coming out.

It all started three weeks ago, when my home broadband died on Saturday. It didn’t come back on Sunday, either. I had written all the stories for the news but had no way of sending it out. So I copied everything to a memory stick and took it into work on Monday so I could deliver the news to the mailing list.

Meanwhile, my ISP’s website was reporting an intermittent broadband fault in my local exchange, which they hoped to have fixed soon.

A few days later my broadband connection had still not returned. I considered a four day solid outage was a bit more than intermittent, so I called up the ISP’s helpline.

The customer service droid made me crawl around on the floor under my desk (I’m way too old and creaky to do that easily), checking the connections to the phone socket, unplugging this, plugging that in a different socket, and so on (goodness, what a lot of dust bunnies live there), before concluding that the fault was, indeed, in the exchange. He put in a service call for an engineer to visit the exchange... but told me it would take several days.

That took me into the holiday weekend, and of course engineers don’t work at the weekend, or on a holiday, so I had three days at home without the internet. This did allow me to catch up on reading a pile of New Scientist magazines that I had been neglecting!

Tuesday, and I was hoping the problem would get fixed. But no. Wednesday, still no broadband, so I got on the phone again and spoke to a techie who knew more about what was happening. It was, indeed, a fault in the exchange that affected more than just me, and they hoped it would be fixed the next day.

Thursday, still no broadband. Back on the phone. Very strange, they said, because the engineer has fixed the fault in the exchange so your broadband should be working now. But it wasn’t. The line tests ok so it really should be working now. But it really wasn’t. So now an engineer was booked to come to my home.

This time they agreed to work at weekends, so Saturday morning, the engineer came, took all the connections under the desk apart, put them back together, and it worked. I had broadband again, after two weeks without.

Phew!

But by this time, it was too late to do a Star. Not only did I have a lot of catching up to do - two weeks of spam! - I also hadn’t been able to harvest the usual crop of real life news stories with which to delight you.

So here we are again, back to normal, after the unexpected break. We’ll be publishing next week, too, but then we’ll be taking another break because the first weekend in June is another holiday weekend.


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