On line again!

We have not had internet for a couple of weeks at home.

There are two reasons for this
1) We didn't pay our phone bill on time- oops! This meant that our outgoing calls and internet were stopped. However, it took them 10 days to reconnect us, even though they said it would happen the evening I paid my bill!
2)And here begins my weary tale...
...A couple of months ago my hard drive packed in, and was replaced. We had all our stuff backed up thankfully. Anyway, I gave the guy in the shop my discs to load my pukka copy of windows XP, but he decided that he'd load a pirate copy for me. I don't know why! Maybe I have the look of a lawbreaker about me!? anyway, I asked him to remove the illegal copy and put my copy back on. He did this, and all the internet settings on my computer were lost, and I had not taken a copy of them. We had to get someone from our ISP to come and reconfigure the settings on our computer, then we were back on line again....
...then we got a virus on our computer designed to infiltrate computers that do not contain service pack 2 for windows XP. My disc did not contain service pack 2. I took my computer back to the shop, and they said they would load SP2 from disc. I left the computer with them, but the next day they explained that they had needed to download the software from windows update...
...To do this, they had obviously changed all my internet settings so that they could go on line in the shop with my computer! And you've guessed it, they didn't think to take a note of my original settings!!...
...Therefore we had to get the man to come from our ISP to reconfigure our computer again...
...That happened yesterday, and so we are back on line again.

I have taken a note of our internet settings!

these sorts of things happen all the time in India. I'm actually not that bothered any more. You learn pretty fast that everything will take 10 times as long as in the west, and that nothing will be straight forwards. The story actually had a couple of other twists in it, but I've kept it simple!