Line up

It would be reassuringly good to say that after my visit home everything here is back to normal, which to an extent it is been. My lessons kicked off again on Wednesday with Massimo and Laura have continued along the same old rhythm; Stephen has been pottering around, with both house and shoe related matters and I have become entangled again in the weekly cycle of domestic tasks. However, there was, for those of you who remember, the small complication of no Internet and the promise by the lady at TIM that a man would come to see to it on Thursday.

Well, Thursday arrived and, like responsible customers, we made sure that at least one of us was at home at all points during the day to welcome the TIM man with open arms. To our dismay, however, those metaphorical arms remained empty; there was not the slightest whiff of an engineer at La Casa dei Due Baffi. When it got to late afternoon Stephen phoned up to see how the land lay, only to be told that if it said Thursday then Thursday it would be and someone would arrive to see to the problem. Despite that assurance, no one appeared either that day or the next, but we did receive a helpful text suggesting we check the modem – because, obviously, we were too stupid to have thought of that in the first place.

When there was still no joy with the Wi-Fi on Saturday we decided to bring in the big guns in the shape of our go-to guy for moments like these: Computer Luca. Hoping that a native speaker may have more luck than us, if only because he could actually shout with some degree of conviction in Italian, he called TIM on our behalf and was told by another lady (or, indeed, the same one for all we know) that an engineer had checked the main junction box up in the town and all was ok. Well, no it wasn’t and isn’t, dear. She promised to send another man on Monday to look again and to check our connection. Far be it for me to tell anyone how do run his business, but would it not have been better for someone to actually come to the house in the first place?

This belief was vindicated on Sunday when, while out walking Bella and Harry, Stephen happened to notice that the telephone line was lying at the side of the road, having come lose from its connection at the pole, which itself was listing at a jaunty angle away from LCDDB. Not that we blame TIM or the engineer for failing to investigate thoroughly our lack of a dialling tone, for if everything was A-OK with the main box then the problem must lie with the idiot Englishmen who obviously didn’t know how to make their modem work properly. So it was back to Luca, who, after conversing with yet another TIM lady, told us that a man would definitely be out with us the next day.

Sure enough, a TIM engineer in his little red van arrived in good time on Monday and set to reattaching the offending telephone line, shimmying up his ladders and ferreting around for a while before, apparently, calling for reinforcements for after about an hour a second engineer appeared. We were a little taken aback when we looked out a little while later to see that they had both disappeared as the first telephone man had said he would be back to check our phone before he left. Still, we took consolation from knowing that Stephen, when tinkering outside, had heard the engineer tell his colleague that he needed the toilet so we assumed they were taking a comfort break somewhere civilised. We need not have worried for while we were wondering when he would return our phone actually rang for the first time ever. It was the man himself, checking that the line was fully operational – which indeed it was.

Not only do we now have the Internet back better than ever, but we’re also able, at last, to use the phone – though with the usual irony that life likes to throw at you, our first two calls were from a woman who wanted to speak to Pia, the butcher at Sigma, the supermarket. Still, we are cherishing all possible telephonic contact while we can for, judging by the angle of the miscreant telegraph pole, the odds on the reattached line surviving past the next high wind look very slim indeed.