It's been a while

It's been a while since I posted due to one thing and another. So I have missed a UFO Thursday and lots of other things, so I hope to catch up a bit now.

Can I just say that Telstra and iinet both suck? I have had a line fault for a week and a half now. At first only my ADSL internet connection was affected so I logged it with my provider iinet - I knew it was a line fault, but as Telstra have previously disabled ADSL on my line twice before, I knew from experience that they would not accept this straight from me, it had to be logged by my internet provider. Now my phone is also completely dead and has been most of the week. I have now spoken with iinet half a dozen times, logged it with Telstra three times who keep telling me there is no line fault so it must be my equipment (hey, I work in IT Support and have tested with various equipment, and know my line is dead!), and I still have no landline or internet. Neither company responded within the time frames they gave me - I had to keep calling them and chasing them up. I also had to take a day off work yesterday to stay home and wait for a technician who was here about 30 seconds and told me my line was dead and left - which is what I had told them in the first place so I don't see why I had to stay at home all day waiting for that. I also have to stay at home all day today waiting for another Telstra technician to show up. Sigh. As you can imagine, I am pretty ropable and am firing off complaints to everybody and their dogs, including the Ombudsman.

In the last 8 or so years, Telstra have disabled ADSL on my line twice; accidentally given my landline number to somebody else; screwed up the patching so everybody in my neighbourhood was receiving someone else's calls and someone else receiving ours for several days. My line has been scratchy and fuzzy since I moved here - sometimes it is unusable so I have to hang up and call people back on my mobile - but despite logging this several times they keep saying it is my equipment, although I have tried several phone handsets. In short, Telstra's service has been appalling.

I've never had too much trouble with my ISP iinet before now, although their customer support staff have always seemed lacking in knowledge - they just read through scripts, often asking irrelevant questions as they don't seem to understand the technology. But as I have not had too many faults before this hasn't worried me too much. This time their lack of experience and incompetence has really shown.

I guess on top of that it has been about 40 degrees all week (100+F) and without air conditioning I haven't been sleeping very much. Today is meant to be the worst day of all.

And on top of that our restructure at work is getting to the final stages and a lot of good people are being treated very horribly. Those that are leaving are having to fight for, and prove, their legal entitlements - it honestly seems like the organisation hopes we are all too ignorant to know our rights and that we won't challenge them for our full payouts. I think I am going to be offered a job in the new structure, however with the way things are, I don't think I can stand working there any more. It is causing me a lot of stress and I think I need to leave for the sake of my mental and physical health.

**End of long rant**

Luckily, someone has lent me his wireless broadband account so I am back online.

I shouldn't be showing this as it is still winging it's way to the house of my Valentine Swap partner, but I don't have very much else for show and tell today. I had fun making this washcloth - I don't normally enjoy knitting but this project was about the right size for me to tackle.

And I enjoyed making this little bag to put the pressies in.