I like this song, but it had to be hacked. It became some bubblegum ambient electronica shit:

These are the source loops I chopped from the original and made it from:

My friend contacted me asking if I could record a vinyl record in and 'make digital now please' for his mum. I don't always exclude favours for those of a parental nature (only try to dodge the never ending house maintenance tasks my own mother saves up for me), so I said I'd do it. When I got my hands on the record it was in fact a tiny piece of actual history... A one-off personal voice recording sent home from the front lines of WW2.

I put the record on, and discovered it was poorly recorded at 78rpm, which very few turntables have as it went out of fashion so long ago that it's become redundant. I thought, no problem, I'll play it in at 45rpm and then time stretch it, complete with pitch adjustment, to make it about 57% of its original length and that should compensate for the difference in speed. This did not produce good results at all, in fact it was unaudioifiable... I had created something of a constant tone punctuated with all sorts of pops and scratches.

I thought, what with my international superstar DJ career, that I would have to go full manual on this thing and rotate the platter by hand at a constant speed close to 78rpm. I did manage to pull this off, of sorts, thanks to my 'mad skillz'. The recording is listenable below.

Worked up this as an idea for animating our logo for the 2011 showreel... Looks unlikely time will allow a showreel to make it into production this year, but I thought it looked okay.

We chose to trust BT with provision of our phone and internet. This was a fundamental mistake as we do use the phone and internet time to time.

18th July

Our telephone line stopped working 18th July. ADSL on the same line carried on working, so we had internet, and the lack of a landland isn't that big a problem as most clients phone my mobile more often than not.

As I have a philosophy that instantly bombarding a provider with faults if things stop working for 5 minutes is counter productive, and other people in our building were having intermittent problems with their BT services, I stayed calm and just got on with it. See, I think I'm an ok customer in this way, and also in the way that I pay on time every time and never quibble at the overly-broken-down separate bills telecoms providers like to use.

28th July

It had been ten days now our landline had been down, internet still worked, but I was starting to think perhaps this was a genuine new fault which BT didn't know about, as ten days is a lot of days to effect a repair, no matter what the extent of it.

I reported the fault on-line using BT's overly difficult to navigate website (should win an award for the worst website in the UK from a user point of view), and they provided me with a little diagram which showed the problem was likely at the exchange, and that repair date would be 29th July.

I thought they were aware of it, and it looked like stuff was actually going to happen and possibly their website wasn't a pile of crap after all.

1st August

Came into the studio expecting that BT would have made things work now, but still no landline though internet was still working.

I used BT's on-line instant messaging thing to 'chat to a representative'. It took about 10 minutes to wait in a queue to chat to someone from the right department at BT, but about 20 minutes before that trying to navigate their website to find how to initiate this chatting.

I typed away asking what was going on and was informed the new repair date was 6th August. Another 5 days without landline was going to bearable, but I was a little suspicious of this ever-evolving date, and pretty convinced it didn't relate to anything in the real world. Probably a random number generating function most likely. I also queried why our internet could be working if the line was down, but 'these things can just work that way sometimes'.

I asked for someone from BT phone me, which they did within a couple of hours. He insisted that the fault was a major underground cable issue and they needed to dig up a road somewhere, which required permits off the council, setting up of temporary traffic lights, etc. I felt that this guy was being pretty honest and imagine he has a pretty awful life working for BT, constantly getting flack of customers who they let down all day every day. I didn't want to add to the UK's over-prescription of anti-depressants by being a total ass with this guy who probably had his hands tied anyway, so accepted that by the following Monday we'd have phones again.

8th August

Still no working phone, and the real kick-in-the-dick was no internet either. This is a big problem for us, in fact, it's completely disabling and we can't do business. However, I saw there was a BT Openreach van working on BT's green cabinet on the street outside, so (being a reasonable, calm customer), just got on with things, using the wifi of friendly neighbours to respond to emails and upload client previews. The shared wifi in our building was down, but they are with BT also so I assumed it was all part of the same problem, which was being fixed by the BT guy outside.

16th August

Over a week later, and nearly a month without phones, I was running a level 10 'pissed off' with us having to waste so much time every day going to a wifi spot, doing our internet things, then coming back to the studio to work. We were grinding to a halt, losing money while BT seemed to be doing nothing except sabotaging us and wasting time feeding us 'inaccuracies' (probably legally better to use that term than LIES).

I used the instant messenger style chat on the BT website via someone else's wifi. First I contacted the ADSL department, which was about an 8 minute wait. They immediately deflected me to the phone department because they can't possibly consider an internet fault if there is an open fault on the phone line - and wouldn't believe the internet was still working while the phone line had the fault until a few days ago. I was an 'idiot' in their eyes.

They re-routed me to the phone line department, which was a 20+ minute wait. They said the fault repair date was now the 22nd August. They didn't care that their lack of provision of service for this long amount of time was in any way poor, and the major underground fault requiring road closures and council permits had metamorphosized into a problem in the exchange due to flooding, which required a really, really special exotic pump to unflood it. Water that gets into exchanges is totally different and much slower to work with, and I was being an unreasonable idiot customer, I believed.

I asked for my enquiry to be escalated, which the representative completely ignored despite me asking 3 times, and in the end basically stopped chatting to me leaving me completely aware that they do not give a shit about anything other than you paying your bills, even if they aren't providing the service.

It dawned on me that I was now 6 months into an 18 month contract with them, and they were not providing services we relied on, and had no intention of effecting an honest, timely repair, or even telling me what was going on... It was impossible to contact anyone who had any real information or authority to get things done.

I concluded the sensible business-minded course of action was obtain these services from someone else, as the current provider could not be trusted. I contacted BT's contracts/disconnections department using the instant messenger chat. This was a 20+ minute wait, and I got to chat to someone fully trained in the BT ways. We had a dynamic round-and-round in circles conversation that went a bit like this:

Me: I want to stop paying you money as you are not providing me with any service

BT Woman: You are in contract, I can stop the services but I will charge you £££££££ because you are breaking the contract

Me: Aren't you supposed to provide us with service? Is that mentioned in the contract anywhere?

BT Woman: I don't have the authority to not raise these charges while there is a fault on your line

Me: This fault is not getting fixed, meanwhile, we're going out of business. I shouldn't be penalised for leaving an agreement that you are defaulting on.

BT Woman: They must be given 'a chance' to fix the fault, then you can come back, discuss why you want to end the contract, and whether or not you have to pay the charges.

Me: Is there a time limit on this 'chance' they need?

BT Woman: No.

20 GOTO 10

I realised I was contractually buggered. The costs of changing to a better provider (e.g. Virgin Media, who I've used at home since 2007 without a single outage or fault), were going to be quite expensive... Due to having a new phone number it would mean reprinting of all sales material, business cards, etc., paying £100 for installation of the Virgin line, and the totally unfounded BT charges to LEAVE their shower-of-shit service behind would all amount to over £500.

17th August

Woke to another day of stressful inefficiency and wondering how long til I just gave up on my business, thought maybe I could vent somewhat by writing this blog entry, but thanks to who-knows at BT our phones and internet were restored to working. I don't know if this was anything to do with my contact with them.

Strange, I thought, as the specialist pumping of the torrents of flood water at the exchange wasn't going to take place for another week, and it had very clearly been insisted upon me that I was being an idiot in trying to suggest they were just making all the dates and causes of faults up.

A happy ending of sorts. I will definitely be leaving BT once our contract is up.

Summary

If you operate a business where you need phones and internet to enable you to maintain an income stream, and you don't have a big buffer of cash to get you through in times where your communications provider indefinitely and disinterestedly stops providing services (while still charging you), then my personal opinion would be to use Virgin Media. Their network is nicer, betterer, and their organisation easierer to deal with. They were about £10 a month more expensive than BT, so I save £120 per year, though BT have cost us many times that with this one fault alone.

I was chatting with one of my clients recently, asking how they managed to sell to their clients who might not be able to see the value in their (more expensive) professional services. He said he always stuck to the truth, 'Go for the cheaper option, and you will find out the true cost of dealing with amateurs'.

Top JCB joyriding action caught by the Islington Mill CCTV last night. Events to note are the hilarious kids on stolen JCB in their ghetto gang dwarfware stalling their ride and the subsequent 'shitting it' reaction of people moving their cars to safe haven inside the courtyard, including myself.