So at last a new front door! Front door man arrived just after the initial frost had disappeared from the back window of the car, which was handy as I had to back the car paste his van. With the sun shining what could possibly go wrong. Well nothing so far actually. But did I mention the teensy little problem with the double glazed units being made for the door?

Well someone must have not been paying attention because the ball got dropped somewhere between us saying “Yes that’s definitely the door for us” in the door warehouse and the door being delivered to us. No actually the current episode started just before we chose the door so I must digress. Apparently it’s not so easy to get solid wood doors these days. You generally get solid wood door with a veneer on both sides which gives it a better finish. It may also enable not such good looking wood to be used as the meat in the sandwich, but since that would require removing the veneer I guess I’m never going to find out. After the last debacle of a door, we had decided we wanted a solid wood door, so we went with the deputy manager of the door warehouse to choose a solid wood door. Here’s a handy tip for you, deputy managers may not be able to tell a solid wood door from a veneered door, despite what you might expect, especially when the wood used is pretty much the same colour to the veneer. You live and learn.

pWhere was I? Oh yes, when the door was delivered, the builder mentioned there was a small problem with the glazing. What that small problem turned out to be was that you could see the black bits that you get on the edges of double-glazed units that are normally all hidden by the frames. This meant that either the glazing firm had messed up or the door warehouse had mistakenly said the doors were compatible with the units. At this point I could have cared less. All I had ever wanted was a front door which kept the outdoors outdoors and the indoors indoors. In my previous life in property maintenance I had learned there are two ways to make something disappear, you either hide it or make it look like it’s supposed to be there. I figured that I could probably do something clever to make the black edging look like a feature of the glazing so delivery was taken. The new new door is now fitted and the outside having been coated with three coats of quality exterior varnish, we await a wet southerly with baited breath.

Did you know that if you are connected to a BT exchange for your ADSL broadband, no matter whether you are paying BT for it or anyone else, you are being monitored 24/7. No? Didn’t think so. Neither did I. Actually for all I know it may happen with other broadband connections, I just happen to know it does happen with BT.

At this point you may well have an image of the interior of the Spooks office full of computers, monitoring you to make sure you’re not doing something very naughty. Incidentally have you noticed that they have computers which are so clever at image enhancement they can create pictures from something that isn’t actually there? I suppose that’s why it’s called image enhancement, for much the same reason that we use the term body enhancement. You start off with something that is barely there and end up with what any sane person would recognise as breaking the laws of physics, despite what Scottie used to say. Did you know the façade used in the Spooks programme is actually the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons in Covent Garden. Can’t imagine why they didn’t use the real MI5 headquarters.

Where was I? Oh yes. Apparently being a broadband subscriber, you have something called a BRAS Profile which is adjusted on your behalf by a thingummy at the BT exchange. If you get a bad connection on your phone line, your BRAS Profile drops as this gadget tries to stabilise the line and the reason this is bad news is that the profile dictates how fast you can connect. So let’s say for the sake of argument you have a nominal broadband download speed of 8Meg. You get a lot of connection problems due to water getting into a joint box at the side of your road and your BRAS Profile drops to adsl135. That means that you will not be able to download faster than 135k, barely more than dual ISDN speeds. And that’s pretty slow I can tell you. From experience.

The good news is that your profile can go up as well as down and the aforementioned thingummy will strive to increase your broadband speed once the BT engineers have emptied the water out of the joint box. Theoretically. I must have a Friday afternoon thingummy as it still hadn’t figured out all was well over 3 whole days later which is what BT considers to be the minimum time before it will recognise there is a problem. Fortunately I have an ADSL provider who think that providing a good service is more important than being the cheapest, and so were only too happy to hassle BT once the minimum time period had elapsed. My profile recovered within a day, and if you’re wondering I’m with Zen Internet. Not cheap, but with a local rate help line which knows what it is talking about and is based in the UK, I can’t speak highly enough of them. How do I know what my profile is doing? Zen has a customer portal where you can login and check it along with a bunch of other things. Well handy if you rely on it for your business as I do. Control freak heaven.