Good Guys

The saga of our difficult relations with Singtel continues. We thought they'd cut off our services. Indeed, a young lady speaking on their behalf seemed to think the same thing, but it turned out we'd lost our broadband simply because it seems they simply don't know how to maintain its supply. That was some time ago. And we've lost our connections more than once since then. In fact, this time round we've been without an Internet connection for about three weeks.

Each time we talk to a customer service officer about this on the phone they ask why we haven't switched to fibre and we say we'd like to but you don't seem to want to allow us to do so. Then they go silent. Each time a hard-working technician comes round to try and restore our various connections they ask the same thing and we give the same reply. They usually look puzzled, but sort of knowingly so, as if familiar with the strange workings of the Singtel bureaucracy, or whoever's bureaucracy it is that is reluctant to allow us to be connected despite our desire to pay to be so. 

We've had three such technicians round already this week, and we're due another tomorrow morning. But here's the thing. It's impossible to get annoyed with the guys who come round, or the people we speak to on the phone, because they are so obviously doing their best to help us and are genuinely sympathetic. There's a kind of sincerely unaffected courtesy about these 'ordinary' workers that gives one hope that the inhuman systems we create might sometimes work to the good of people. But it's a faint hope, at best, and probably illusory.