British Telecom had sent me a number of messages saying they were going to upgrade my system to glass fibre, and ‘long story short’ I now have 110 megabytes per second download, upload speed 19 megabytes per second but I’m not quite sure how I’m going to benefit from this because it was already working at  satisfactory speed.

Anyway it has to be done as copper cables are being replaced and made redundant.

I remember the first days of the internet when you had to wait a considerable time for a message to be sent. I remember when computers were as big as suitcases if not bigger and mobile phones were the size of bricks. You can work out how old I was, not that it matters very much.

Anyway we will booked in to be seen between eight am and one pm and about 11 o’clock a chap called Tyler turned up all bright and breezy ready to start his work. He was very communicative and positive about his work and put us at our ease. I was introduced briefly to the world of underground wiring. In the street there was a manhole about 20 meters away but I had not noticed this must have been the telecoms Centre from which wires to each house must have been routed.

I remember being in India where there were no such underground cables and each house was festooned with wires some of which were telephone and others of which were mains electricity. It was quite common for people to tap in to steal free electricity. In UK we are fairly organised.

The engineer had to feed a length of cable which was on a drum through what must have been one pipe to the telephone outlet which was hidden in the service locker by the front door. That took about 30 minutes. The place where all our routing takes place is in the far end of Francoise’s office and working room. To describe her room as full is an understatement. The four walls from floor to ceiling are crammed with files, art materials, books, papers.

This is important to mention because it was necessary for the engineer to drill a 10mm hole through the brickwork in order to feed the fibre cable into the junction box. While he made his arrangements outside doing the junction box, we had to speedily clear the room to enable access. We chatted while he was working.

It appears that he receives 60 pounds per job. Assuming he has to pay his own expenses, that makes it 30 pounds an hour gross. In our case, as he was with us for the best part of of two hours. I suspect that BT has subcontracted to other entities who have taken a healthy cut of what they have received. He said that the management does not care about the workers and that he was looking for another job with BT Openreach.

I wrote to him afterwards thanking him for his work and saying that in all probability he would get better terms and conditions than on a self employed a job-by-job basis. Employment is much less secure than a regular salary, which, from the latest figures that I can find would be about 30K a year with more expenses being covered such as vans, petrol, and so on. Evidently he had worked in Australia for three years before returning to look for something that required more brain power.

I’m appalled about the low standards of management. He tried to call head office during his visit on what he thought was the right number, but that number was not in service. He told us that the managers never give the customer the details that they require and leave it all to the service agent.

In spite of these complaints, he had a good, friendly constitution, and we chatted away about many things. He said that customers themselves do not complain, but neighbours often complain and ask him inappropriate questions, for example, whether he is entitled to do the work and whether he is trained, and so on. I suppose that’s because he looked young. He was actually sent back two weeks later to the woman who F**d and B**d at him but he retained is composure.

I reckon an average payment per job should be at least 85 pounds because some of the jobs are very difficult and involve climbing ladders to a  first floor flat for example so you need to be a general handyman, diplomat, contortionist and be willing to work in all types of weather.