Patterns

Long time no write…

I’ve been on vacation during the past weeks and on my return last Friday I found a letter from Deutsche Telekom announcing they would install the land line on Tuesday, the 27th of May which is - today!

At 12:23h the service technician rang the bell (absolutely on time, he was scheduled to arrive sometime in the afternoon past 12:00h) and was gone after only 5 minutes went by. The installation went lightning fast (he had to connect two wires in a switchbox in our basement) and now I have a land line from Deutsche Telekom. YAY! The months of waiting, fearing, crying and praying finally payed off…

So what do I do with that land line? I already have one with a call flatrate which works fine. Hm, so let’s first connect a phone to it - *ring* *ring*. How can the phone ring when I did not hand out the phone number to anyone so far?

Interesting, Versatel trying to reach a Mr. Aslan. No, sorry, that’s not me. At least now I now who already owned that number before which makes the new phone number not that shiny and new anymore. Actually it feels kinda worn off to me. OK, enough with the distraction, let’s concentrate on the actual reason why I ordered that phone line in the first place which is: Getting VDSL.

As the online availability check shows that VDSL is not available for this phone number I call the service desk of Deutsche Telekom to find out that there are still processes that need to run in the background and I should call again tomorrow. Now I’m worried… At least he tries to calm me down and performs the check again with the phone number of my neighbour living downstairs which shows VDSL50 availability. Well, so I have to wait for tomorrow it seems (I’m now an expert at waiting you know)…

Ode to Cron

Oh dear master of time

Run those little badly written shell scripts well

Else you will send many people to their own hell

And I will never be able to get VDSL

Before I forget:

on Tuesday, the 29th of April the construction crew from Deutsche Telekom actually showed up and started digging a small hole directly in front of our house and added an amplifier + extra wire for our new phone line. As we left for vacation the next day I am kind of unsure of the outcome aka if I am now in a position to order VDSL. We shall see…

I didn’t write a lot lately primarily due to the fact that I was pretty busy with work-related projects.

To give you a little update on the VDSL matter The following things happened in the past weeks:

• I received a call from a call-center agent to ask again whether I would really need an additional phone line instead of migrating my Arcor line over to Telekom
• Last week Thursday the local building team called to inform me that they would do groundworks this Tuesday at 07:30am!

Yep, you read correct. This could mean I would be finally getting the Telekom phone line installed this week. The moment of truth is getting nearer and nearer…

P.S.: For the ones that didn’t read all of the VDSL postings: Before I am able to place an order for VDSL with the Deutsche Telekom I need a phone line from them (which I currently don’t have). So only with a phone line I will be able to make an availability check and place the order. If you ask me how far I am in the whole process I would say probably somewhere around 15%. Not that much considering I started the journey on February 24th.

Stay strong! I will…

Today at 09:23h CET the Telekom called in to ask if I was to actually keep my current phone line from Arcor in addition to the new one from Deutsche Telekom. I assume they made the call in order to save money (a building team has to be sent out to actually install a wire) which is generally a wise step. I told the call-center agent that I am planning to keep the old line in addition to the new one for backup purposes and she confirmed that the building team is going to install the missing wire “soon^tm“.

No, the journey is not over yet. But we are definitely in a state I would call stalled. As I haven’t heard back from Deutsche Telekom for quite some time I called in again today in order to find out that actually nothing has happened so far. The agent told me that the local building team would finish the installation by the 04/28/08.
Yes, that is correct. By the end of April! I’m quite certain that all VDSL ports will be gone by then. But:

It’s not over until it’s over.