Wow, I have just suffered for two very long weeks without broadband access at home, and it has practically killed me! I am not even exaggerating. Perhaps I am seriously (and rather unhealthily) addicted to social networking, but I need the internet to promote my novels for sale. I’m sure my fellow Indie authors will understand.

It all happened the day after I submitted my NaNoWriMo novel to the website for validation. I am so glad I finished it 4 days early! Otherwise I would have failed in the challenge through no fault of my own. It took a whole week for our network provider, TalkTalk, to inform me we had had a server fault in our local area. This came after several phone calls from me to their customer service teams.

When the server was repaired and we still had no internet, the call centre advisor asked me to unscrew our telephone point and plug the land-line phone directly into the test socket. She then diagnosed a line fault, for which we would need a visit from a BT engineer. When after two more days of waiting I received a text message asking me to phone TalkTalk and make an appointment, I was getting a little more stressed.

Imagine my anger when the unhelpful advisor on the phone told me there were no notes on my account and could I phone back later to make the appointment! I went crazy. I made a formal complaint. I demanded to speak to a manager (who still has not phoned me back after 48 hours), and I told them I would find another service provider.

In the meantime I had received messages from TalkTalk via Twitter when they saw my very agitated tweets to the world. They sent me a replacement router, which at first seemed unsuccessful. That was 2 days ago. Today my husband and father-in-law had a look at the connections and voila, now we are back online! No need for a telephone engineer, we can do it ourselves thank you very much TalkTalk!

So, tonight I am networking with a vengeance! It is great to be back online, and I will read and respond to a backlog of blogs and newspaper articles in due course. Hello my friends, I have missed you!