NBN’s call of the wild

I’D PUT OFF MOVING ONTO THE NBN FOR QUITE A WHILE BECAUSE … I’D HEARD ALL THE HORROR STORIES AND COUPLED WITH THE FACT THAT I HAVEN’T MET A PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY THAT LIKES ME, I HAD WAITED AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.

IWISH to accept this best director’s award on behalf of anyone who has ever felt phone rage. “My movie called Die Telecommunications Company, Die is a tribute to the thousands of average Australians who have had to go through the process of getting the NBN installed and it hasn’t gone smoothly. The script was inspired by true events. “I’m so proud of actor Jack Nicholson who played my part so brilliantly and really captured how one flew over my cuckoo’s nest. “I’d put off moving onto the NBN for quite a while because in my former life as an editor I’d heard all the horror stories and coupled with the fact that I haven’t met a piece of technology that likes me, I had waited as long as possible. “I knew in the back of my mind it wouldn’t go well so when the employee from my telecommunications company told me technicians could hook up NBN without me being home I was thrilled. A win for me. But that’s where the albeit short winning streak ended.

“It took more than an agonising hour in the shop on a Sunday afternoon for the lovely employee to try and log an appointment into the computer. But there were computer issues. In the end I left and he rang the next day to say it was all sorted now and that I didn’t even need a new modem; the one I had would work. ‘How easy was that?’, I thought.

“It’s a semi-interesting, slightly drawnout start to the movie but the tension really starts to build the day of the appointment. The technicians come and go and the old Wi-Fi is cut. Frustratingly, nothing happens when cables are plugged into the old modem.

“Three frustrating days without the internet and several attempts to get through on the company’s helpline start to turn me/Jack into a psycho.

“On Freaky Friday there is success and finally a real person on the phone to talk to and try to find out why NBN isn’t working. Almost one-and-a-half hours of plugging cables into holes that don’t exist, turning electricity on and off, smashing plates to relieve the pressure, a three-year-old singing Let It Go at the top of her voice and a phone operator thanking me for my patience after each of the FOUR TIMES I’M PUT ON HOLD was finally too much.

“I know it’s a confronting final scene when Jack rips the phone off the wall and wraps the cord around his daughter’s Winnie the Pooh and straps him to the balcony railing but I think it’s a defining moment. The final straw for Jack was being told he had an old modem and that he would have to wait another week for a new one to be sent to him.

“You’ll be happy to know I‘ll probably make a sequel called The New Modem Went Missing In The Mail. “Thank you and peace to you all.”