Electric string

The thing about my luxurious temporary accommodation is its luxury and also how temporary it is. Despite my only being in a one-bed flat in West Bay (there’s posh!) for up to a month, I nevertheless was disappointed to discover that the internet wasn’t working. I complained to HR, who told the computer geeks.
Then IT told the Alderney,
And he told the Dairymaid,
Until I was advised
To make a formal fault report.

I phoned Q-Tel.

As promised, Q-Tel contacted me within 48 hours, and I was obliged to drop everything and rush to the other end of town to let the technician fiddle with my router. The verdict was that there was a problem with the electric string connecting the telephone to the wall, and I would need a different cable. So as the technician left, I had a working internet but was missing the correct phone cable.

I know precisely zero about the inner workings of telecommunications equipment. How naïve of me to imagine that, if I bought a phone cable in Qatar that had the right plug on each end and was labelled as being suitable for telephones in Qatar, that it would be the correct cable. Once plugged in, the phone remained as dead as flared corduroy trousers, and so I logged another fault complaint with Q-Tel.

Sure enough, within 48 hours a technician phoned me. “No, actually I’m not sitting at home on the off-chance that you might happen by. I am in fact at the other end of town working and earning the money that enables me to stay here. Yes, of course I’ll drop everything and head straight home to let you in. For the second time this week.”

It turns out that the cable I’d bought was the wrong type. It looks identical to the correct type, but has four internal wires instead of two. And Q-Tel is allegedly special: unique in the Gulf in using the two-wire system. So much for “fully compatible with the Gulf” as it says on the box.

I wasn’t going to let the technician escape without leaving a working land-line. He snipped off the wrong plug from the original cable and crimped the correct plug on to the end. Everything now works. Why, I ask myself, did the first technician not do that? Changing the plug took approximately 20 seconds.

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