We moved into our new flat with minimal problems. We unpacked, froze some ice cubes, and sat down to do some ordering. Pizza, flat pack furniture, a robot mop, and broadband. Since there seems to be no such thing as a good broadband service we went with the devil we knew, or at least the one devil we knew that wasn't TalkTalk. It would be more than two weeks until the router arrived, but we decided we could maybe just about handle that.
Two weeks passed. We had our first house guests. We located nearby supermarkets, pubs, cafes, and the Majestic Wine Warehouse. We planned our housewarming. I made two bedside drawers, a bookcase and a desk from the flat pack. We drank criminally expensive champagne. Patrick had his PhD graduation. I set up my new sewing area and made a skirt. We booked the most ridiculous holiday to St. Lucia. We named the robot mop Steve.
Then came Internet Day.
I had to wait in all day for the guy to turn up with the router, which was quite daunting given my current habit of walking about 10km a day, so I prepared. Patrick bought me a new sewing pattern and some fabric, and I got some puzzle magazines and an old season of Project Runway. I was not going to be driven mad by one day indoors, no sir. At 9.30 I got a message saying the courier was on his way, at 11.30 I was working out fitting adjustments to my new top, and at 1.30 I got another message saying my parcel had been delivered. Except it hadn't. Nobody had rung the doorbell, nothing had been left outside. Using the last dregs of 3G I had for the month, I went into an online livechat with the courier company.
"Yes," they said. "It's been delivered and signed for by someone called Sam."
"There's no Sam here."
"Maybe it's with one of your neighbours?"
Thinking that okay, maybe they just weren't paying attention to the letter after the house number, I went next door to B, where a slightly surly man told me he didn't have it. In a bit of a state now because you promised me internet today, dammit, I phoned Virgin to complain. They told me they would call within two days to tell me if they'd found the parcel and arrange redelivery. The idea of going without internet for another week or more turned me into a rather less controlled version of my mother. I said things like, "that's just not acceptable". I asked to speak to a manager. I told them we would be considering cancelling the service altogether. But they were insistent. Two days for a phone call to arrange redelivery.
Anxiety Jen did not cope very well with this. I spent the rest of the afternoon pacing about, stress-eating crisps, crying embarrassingly, and composing poisonously polite complaint letters in my head. How was it going to take them two days to get back to me? The box was presumably on this road somewhere. Were they planning to retrieve it, take it back to the depot and redeliver it from there? It seemed farcical.
At about 6pm, as I was making plans to wash my face and go and knock on a few doors either side of ours to see if I could find this mysterious Sam, the doorbell rang. Standing there was a young beardy guy holding what was clearly our internet setup kit.
"Hi," he said, "is this yours?"
"I... yes."
"It got delivered this morning," he said. "I work down by the cricket ground, they must have got the road name confused."
"I've been calling people all day trying to find out where this got to, thank you so much." I took the box from him, torn between astonishment that someone would take the time to deliver this thing to our house after work, irritation that a professional courier had delivered thing fifteen minutes away from our house to a street whose name wasn't even remotely similar, and relief that I hadn't gone and knocked on ten people's front doors for no reason.
Patrick got home a few minutes later, also prepared to start knocking on doors and/or cancel the service.
"Internet!"
"Internet!"
"A lovely man brought it to me. It got dropped off at his office in the Oval."
"In the Oval??"
"I know, right? We'd never have found it."
We set up the internet. It didn't work. We called Virgin again, who I think put an "angry customer" note on my account, and they told us everything would be working within half an hour. Half an hour later I went to the registration page to be told "Oops, something's broken." We tried a few more times, but the something continued to be broken. We went to bed.
This morning the something persisted in being broken, so I called them again. The woman on the phone did something to the system, told me I had a lovely voice (which literally nobody has ever said before unless they're about to make a guess at my accent and want to pre-empt any offence I might take) and told me to give it an hour. The thing reset itself a couple of times, and then... there was internet. Shiny, glorious internet, beaming through our flat, glinting in the sunlight.
It's working. I am reconnected. I am going through a cycle: happy and relieved, embarrassment at how large a difference having the internet has made to my wellbeing, remembering that actually the internet is classed as a human right these days, happy and relieved. No more rationing my phone data, freaking out every time the number goes up. No more snapping at customer service representatives, which is an awful thing to do and I hate it. I can just be here, in my lovely new flat, with access to the whole world again.
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