Apathy Sketchpad

Thankyou for choosing BT OpenWorld Broadband. Before you place your order, you must enter your postcode and telephone number, so that we can check that your local telephone exchange can accomodate ADSL connections, but fail entirely to check that it isn’t completely full. Once this step is complete, you may proceed to enter your Preferred Activation Date. This should be the date two days after you would like to be informed of the delay, and one month prior to the activation of your broadband line.

In the meantime, you may feel free to entertain yourself by installing your delightfully expensive new modem. This is the strange green fish-looking thing with the lights on the front. This must be plugged into your computer’s USB socket, which will provide it with almost enough power to operate, causing it to stop working arbitrarily, and requiring your computer to be rebooted several times a day or, if you are unlucky, resetting your computer almost at random. But don’t worry — until your account is activated all it does is flash lights at you anyway. You must also install the Splitter Boxes wherever you feel they look best.

For more information about why we have made no apparent attempt to activate your account in the weeks since your “Confirmed Activation Date”, please phone our customer care line, on 0845 555-4663 if you are a home customer, or 0845 555-2874 if you are a business customer. Both of these numbers will apparently get through to the same computer controlled response center, which will ask you to press numbers on your phone, and then inform you that your account will be activated on your “Confirmed Activation Date”, now up to four weeks in the past. If this does not give you the information required, please phone again. This time, we reccomend you press different buttons, and if you are lucky you will be allowed to speak to our highly trained staff, who will be more than happy to take your details and put you on hold for forty minutes. If you manage not to hang up after forty minutes of The Four Seasons, then we will transfer you back to our staff, who will inform you that we are very busy and ask you if you would like to be called when we had somebody available to help you. You then have the option of hanging up and not ever getting help, or going back on hold.

Several days later we will randomly activate your account, and send you an email to confirm this. If you want to use the connection on two computers at once, it is easy to find software on the internet which can act as a Proxy server, meaning it will allow other computers to acces the internet via the computer it is running on, often for up to a day before it arbitrarily stops working for no discernable reason. This will not allow you to use MSN Messenger, because it was programmed by the evil Microsoft Corporation.

We hope you enjoy using your new connection, and continue to pay for it.