We have terrible mobile phone coverage where we live and it’s unlikely to get better for a long time.

I rang the mobile phone network people and told them about the lack of coverage. The support person went away and had a look at their system to see what sort of coverage I really had and confirmed that we have good coverage. Hello, no we don’t. She dug a bit deeper and found that there are areas of black spots where we live. Yup, that’s the one and I’m stuck firmly in the middle of it. The trouble is that their network engineers don’t do any of this digging through their systems to see what the coverage really is, they just look at the system that says we have good coverage.

So I know we have lousy coverage, the support person knows we have lousy coverage but the network engineers don’t know we have lousy coverage. The support person said that there was nothing that could be done to improve coverage in the foreseable future. I said naively ‘can’t you just tell them it doesn’t work?’. Of course the answer was ‘it’s not as easy as that’. Why isn’t it? No doubt there’s some foul office politics involved or some statistics system that they don’t want to upset by pointing it at some real data and upsetting half a dozen apple carts. Hence fat chance of any network improvement until a sea change occurs and another generation has come around.

I found a way round the problem by using the iPhone’s call forwarding option, which works really well. The caller isn’t even aware that he’s been rerouted to another number. I just have to remember to switch on call forwarding when at home and switch it off when I go out.

When Heathrow’s shambolic terminal 5 opened a fews weeks ago you could see the departure and arrivals boards on one of the BAA web pages. Whenever I checked the departures for the lame new terminal in it’s first week of opening every single flight was delayed and many were cancelled. I’ve just had another look and you can’t see live flight departure times right now. Instead there is a page apologising for the missing data and a whole load of telephone numbers for the poor hapless flyers to ring to see if they are destined to go anywhere today. This is either a system that has genuinely busted (Again? Ed) or if flights from t5 are still delayed, then maybe it’s been taken off line as it was providing too many horrible statistics for the great unwashed to check too easily.