Hope (fading)

This is a post that betrays GF's continued optimism. This was written with Live Writer to see if the content lock has now been cleared as a result of GF's phone call to the t-Mobile help desk.

In fact the saga continued. Whatever they did to lift the content lock seemed to lose the use of the phone  signal strength indicator dropped from 5 bars to zero, no calls, no internet, nothing. Expensive land-line call tried to deal with problem and GF continues to wait for a signal and promised call-back. He wonders, in passing, whether their attempted fix/reset cleared his account roaming settings and consequently can't pick up the Orange signal he had been using! He called the man from t-Mobile to explain his theory, but this was discounted and GF was told the problem was a fault in their network and that there had been no service in this post code area for 3 days. GF tried to explain that there had up until 1700 the previous evening, but the it was evident that facts were not in line with the script he was following. GF gave up for now and resigned himself to remaining off-grid for a while.

Meanwhile, steady rain has hammered to the apartment throughout the night and continues to fall this morning. Tentative plans of yesterday have been ditched and a new plan developed which should keep us essentially undercover.

The new plan was to head for Exeter and wander round the shops and town, generally. The journey was not to troublesome, but the first stage did involve many miles of single track roads some in terrible states of disrepair. Never mind, we got there and parked without incident. We started to wander around and GF saw a t-Mobile shop. He headed for door his phone was now working properly, but the dongle was still apparently dead. The nice man took the dongle and tested the SIM only to find it was dead but in exchange for just a few our fine English pounds to top up the credit, he exchanged the SIM free of charge. GF should now be fully back on the grid. A couple of quick posts from central Exeter showed this to be true so the tour of Britain's retail outlets continued.

We took lunch in a tapas restaurant near the Apple store iTortillas, iGambas, iChorizo, iPaella and some coffee; then we continued round the Guildhall Centre and so forth. When we had seen all we had set out to see we headed back north to Bideford for a quick stop for supplies before returning to the apartment.

Back at the apartment GF's phone dropped to zero service again, and the refreshed dongle remained stubbornly inoperative. Given that it had been functioning in Exeter, it was clear that problem was localised after all. GF is grid-ready, but his sector of the grid is dead. Meanwhile, GF should point out that Silver Vixen抯 phone gets only an occasional signal, so we are pretty much out of range. This makes GF realise that he was right to try and complete the staff evaluations last weekend, before we travelled, because it would have been a complete non-started from here as much of the input data is stored in Starfleet's cloud.