We have a phone line after six months

An early entry this week: the neighbours who kindly let us share their line and broadband account are getting their own PC in, which means they need their account back, so no more internet access for us...that's bad! But we have our own phone line now (see below), so could get our own account...that's good! But the ISP has run out of network addresses, so we can't get an account until they upgrade in a few weeks...that's bad! But we may be able to wirelessly connect across to the neighbours for the meantime...that's good! The upshot is, I have no idea if we're going to have a home connection later this week, so I'm posting now.

To the newly installed phone line...so some telephone guy shows up earlier in the week, and connects the phone; the owner had to pay (‘make a facilitation payment’) some 2000 dinah (roughly 1:1 with the Oz dollar) to get that done.

They hooked into a phone line running across the back wall (we have been given our own phone number though, so I don’t think we’re still just sharing the neighbour’s line), ran a cable across the yard, through the dining room window and jerry-rigged it into the phone cable off our handset. It took about five minutes. Then they left.

Thirty years of Western experience said, no, no, they haven’t left, they’ve just gone to do something at the exchange, this was just to see if the line was working. They’re going to come back and connect us in properly so that all the literally dozens of phone sockets throughout the house work, they won’t leave a phone cable strung across our yard at garrotting height leading through a window to a single handset in the most inconvenient place in the house.

Six months of Libyan experience, unfortunately kicking in after they’d made their escape, said that’s exactly what they’ve done. I just wish they’d told me straight up that that was what was happening, so I could have at least got them to string the line in through the office window – you know, where we’d like our internet access to be. Never mind, Blue Sun maintenance will fix it.