Technology and the Countryside

After a prolonged absence from blogging due to time pressure I have decided to start again. This is prompted particularly by a series of technology frustrations that began with a brave idea to upgrade my mobile phone.

It’s a long and boring story but in the saga of lost data, a lost password, a dud iPhone and a blame-shifting game between o2, Apple, Eclipse internet and our IT support company which continued until the phone was replaced I realised that the real frustration was not being able to speak to anyone to help sort the problem unless you can go into real live premises. With Eclipse I had to type my questions in a form of telephone tennis and wait for an answer so that something that could have taken 5 minutes took an hour. If you live in ‘deep country’ getting to live premises isn’t easy (if they will let you in at all) although I have to say that the Apple store in Exeter have been excellent.

Life has become more complicated since the recent storms brought down a beech tree and, with it, the telephone line which of course carries the internet connection. We run a holiday business as well as the farm at home and, gloriously peaceful as the radio silence is, I can’t help but think that we are losing business. We only just got the tax and VAT sorted out in time (sadly!) There must be others in the same boat. My replacement phone cannot be backed up now because we have no connection. Thus my last lifeline has been severed and the saga continues!

 Of course you can’t speak to anyone who can really help at BT.I am planning a gentle ambush of a telephone engineer to get his mobile number which I will auction for charity. You can get in a queue to speak to someone in Mumbai but then you get general answers not specific to your locality. I would just like to know when they are going to mend the line. Apparently someone has been out to look at it and has decided that a survey is needed. What rubbish! The tree broke the line. It needs to be mended. We could have told them that.

A privatised BT beholden to its shareholders may have saved the public purse lots of money and made its investors wealthier but there needs to be a balance. An effective monopoly providing basic infrastructure to rural businesses needs to provide a better and more accessible service and send its employees on the sort of customer service courses that tourism businesses use. It is the ‘old fashioned’ concept of personal communication using the spoken word that has been lost. Technology encourages this. On-line bookings dealt with remotely, reliance on texts, emails and social media, the lack of phone numbers displayed on websites- too much is for the convenience of the provider rather than the customer.

Better broadband speeds will be welcome in the countryside but not if it means that essential service providers forget that their customers can feel very cut off and their businesses vulnerable if there is no-one to talk to!