New telephone pole, nice wiring screwup....

[twocvbloke]

Well, we got a new telephone pole (well, telegraph pole for us brits) outside, as the old one was getting too weak apparently, and so they set about snipping wires and pulling up the old pole to be replaced with the new one, everything going well and things being altered, adjusted and updated...

Then, I noticed they made an error on next door's cables, which is now my uncle's house (should be moving in tomorrow), as the landlord had previously had two separate phonelines while living there, the main household NTE5 master socket was upstairs in one of the bedrooms, with all the extensions running from there, downstairs was a completely trashed, old, worn out 1980's LJU2/1A master that had not seen service for a long time it seems, so, what does the contractor lackey (not even a proper engineer!!) do? He only goes and cuts off the dropwire to the NTE5 and leaves the old master socket as the house's only phone socket...

But that's not all...

I told them of this error, and the response was "Well if BT sees there's a line there, that's all they care about, they don't care if it's an old one", bearing in mind that to run extensions of an LJU2/1A master, you have to plug them in as the entire socket is BT's property, so adding extensions to that would be an unsightly business...

But wait, there's more!!

Upon inspecting the socket myself, I found that about 3 inches of the dropwire to the old master socket had been cut away indoors at somepoint, presumably when the double-glazed windows were fitted, so not only has the NTE5 Master been killed, the old one doesn't even work anyway!!!!

So as it stands, the house has no functional telephone line, and at this rate, my uncle will most likely be charged for a "new line installation", they won't get away with it though, I'll see to that...

I don't know, never send a contractor to do an engineer's job....

[dsk]

  But.. it is modern to outsource... and everybody does.  ( )

I'm quite sure this trend makes trend makes everybody happy, except for the last person in the chain, who are paying it all.

We do it all time her too, and I'm starting to think it is all made up to keep all of us in full time work, instead of more an alternative. 

I stop there before It turns to politics.   

dsk

[twocvbloke]

The problem with outsourcing to contractor lackeys is they don't have the test equipment to do one simple task to check if a line to a house has a master socket connected to it, and that is a resistance test, heck, a simple multimeter could do that, as all UK master sockets have a resistor in them to check to see if a line has a master on the end, whether or not there is a telephone there, had they done that simple, basic, infant school test, they'd have known not to snip the upper dropwire, and now there's even more work for someone else (most likely an actual BT/Openreach engineer WITH such test equipment!!) to reconnect the NTE5, cos there's not enough cable exposed at the old style master to use adequately without having to chip off plaster and have the socket mounted high up off the windowsill...

Still, there's a contact number on the new pole for complaints about the new installation, so, I'll be contacting them cos this is just an act of stupidity to cut wires which they didn't even check were connected or not...