As you'll see the sketches stopped their regular schedule at the end of last week as two elements arose to hinder their production. The first, a fantastic hindrance, was one that we knew was arriving at any time at the end of March. In true style she kept us waiting ten more days but I'd like to announce the birth of our third child, Lucy Anne Reid who arrived on Thursday 8th April. Its all about the timing and we timed this one perfectly as only an hour after arriving at the hospital our daughter arrived (5.31pm), a healthy 8lbs 1oz. Third time is a charm and in the eyes of the NHS an indication that we might know what to do with a new born baby so after a few checks we where heading home at 1 o' clock in the morning and all tucked up in our beds by 3am, not that we got much sleep :)So the family has grown by another mouth and we are all still finding the new routine to settle into. With that in mind I'll be taking a small break from posting my ink sketches until we have found that routine and I can handle three kids and work at the same time. I hope that it won't take too long and you'll soon be inundated with Doctor Who and various other sketches before you've had a chance to realise I was gone. I will still be posting my regular contribution on Scotch Corner every Tuesday while I'm away so make sure you drop by and check that out.
On top of the arrival of Lucy we also had a slight technical problem. Last Tuesday night (6th) just after I'd finished setting the last Cyberman sketch to post the following morning my internet ceased to function. A bit of jiggery-pokery and hitting the 're-set' button didn't resolve the matter and a phone call to my ISP the next morning set the wheels in turn to find out what was wrong. Long story short there was nothing wrong at 'my end' and a problem at the local telephone exchange required an engineer to resolve the matter. This morning my internet supply was returned to me. In all the years I've had internet (dial up and then broadband) I've only ever had three suppliers. First was Freeserve who was bought by Orange. I ran into problems with my broadband about two years ago and I'll not go into details but the sheer lack of help or interest from Orange in resolving the problem led me to seek a new provider and I joined BT. I tried for six weeks to get someone from Orange to show interest in my case but I'd hear nothing back from them and every time I phoned to enquire I'd go through the long effort of having to explain what the back story to my complaint was and tell them what they had promised they'd be doing to resolve things, every three or four days I'd phone and every time I'd get the same excuses.
Eventually I decided enough was enough and requested my 'Migration' code to change providers. Orange offered me nine months of free broadband to stay but as I pointed out to them if I can't actually use my broadband it being free for nine months or not wasn't going to be a great incentive. Seeing I wasn't going to be changed on the matter they sent me my code to migrate to another provider. How did they send it? By email of course, not the greatest brains in use at Orange I think.
Now everyone will have a different story when talking about ISPs and I'm sure you could find a lot of people who have had a bad experience with BT but I'm not one so far. For the week that I had no service I got a phone call from them every day updating me with the situation, I had an engineer call around to the house after four days to check the line. I had more interest from them to resolve the matter in one week than all the technical support from either Freeserve or Orange put together over a ten year period. For me BT Broadband gets the thumbs up.
