Kafka'ish'

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. No doubt the last remnants of humanity had been sucked out of him by sustained exposure to feckless call centre operatives.

You see dear reader, I am writing this from from home for the first time having finally been connected to broadband. However, this is a cautionary tale such was the Herculean effort it took to get through the hoary tendrils of bureaucracy and incompetence.

To get the best deal (or so I thought) I signed up for a new phone and free broadband. The phone, since you ask, is proper nice and everything in that department was quickly and efficiently sorted. So far so good. Yet when I tried to get broadband I was told it was not possible as there was already an account set up on the line. Now this was news to me since I'd set up the phone line when I moved in and to the best of my knowledge there were no nocturnal hackers sneaking into the house to use my phone line after lights out. Still when I suggested they get rid of it I was told they couldn't as they hadn't set it up. I felt like John Hurt unwittingly letting the Alien incubate inside his stomach. It was suggested I ring BT and ask them to find out who put the account on the line and to sort it out. Now I don't want to go all 'That's Life' so to stop Esther Rantzen appearing with a funny shaped carrot I'll cut out the constant backward and forwarding between phone companies. In the end some Yorkshire pudding at my new provider suggested (after keeping me on hold for twenty minutes) that I should ring around all Internet providers on the off chance that it was one of their accounts and ask if they'll remove it from my line. All Internet providers!!! Can you imagine.

When I eventually did get connected I was sent a letter to inform me of such. I was told that I would need a password to log on and that this would be sent to my new email account. The flaw in this particular plan being; how was I supposed to read the email if I couldn't get on the Internet? At least the next call centre bod had the decency to laugh at my predicament. Weeks later the necessary equipment turned up but true to form I found it didn't work. I then spent the child's college fund calling a premium helpline in India but to no avail. Despite hemorrhaging money like a crack addict, my friends from the sub continent could do nothing to ease my frustration. Finally I took the laptop to work and asked the IT technician to have a go at it. Incredibly and without cost he got everything sorted so, after my labyrinthine ordeal, I finally have broadband at home. I suppose it could be described as Kafkaesque in the style of 'Before the Law' but I always preferred his weird animal stories about talking apes and horses studying law anyway. Maybe my tale should end up with the people at the call centre turning out to be jackals chancing their arm with another ignorant northerner. But they weren't jackals of course; they were ****s.