I have been away for quite long. If you have had the misfortune of suffering a brain freeze, you may understand. And since I have started with excuses, I may as well state right away that am in a bad mood.

And two things are responsible for that mood;

1. A guy with an accent and bad grammar
2. An internet cable

Said guy works for an ISP called the Broadband Company. And he is the one that brought this annoying cable into my life.

Apparently, the company is running a promotion, where they provide you with the hardware free, just so you can hook onto their service. Having tried half of the mobile internet services available in town, we thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try something ‘wired’ and see how it works.

Having signed on, we had to beg the guys for close to a week (their excuse; we are working on many connections) before they finally showed up at our office, stomping all over the place like an Anti-Terror Squad.  The squad was headed by a guy whose Ugandan tongue must suffer such atrocity, from being forced to sound Jamaican. Antennas, sockets and cables were whipped out and in seconds our poor office turned into a wire-web. Imagine our excitement. Finally, we were getting some serious internet!

My first shock was to see a guy trying to fasten the cable to a window frame, with plastic fasteners (the kind they use to close ballot boxes). A few minutes of explaining neatness and professionalism produced the tiny screw-like hooks he should have used in the first place.

For a package of UGX 100,000, at least someone should be able to tell you a good part of the story. The part that Broadband didn’t think we deserved to know before signing on was that their promotion avails you only one cable. Forget that you had explained that there are about four computers in your small office.

An earful from my boss and a number of mis-constructed sentences from the accent guy later, we plug in the cable and the connection is too weak to open even the Broadband website. Accent-guy says there is nothing he can do; his job was to make sure the cable is in place.

A call to Customer Care yielded one answer; “If the connection you got doesn’t work for you, pay more money for a package with higher speed.” So my boss asks; “But I thought high speed data is what you sell?” Why sell me something you know doesn’t work? If you are a monopoly and consumers don’t have choice, may be you can take chances.

Telecom companies sell all manner of things from sim cards and airtime to internet and mobile phones. Broadband sells just internet, but they do a good job of making you hate their service, before the first click.

For that reason, I found myself reading the dictionary.

broad·band

[brawd-band] IPATelecommunications.

adjective

1.of, pertaining to, or responsive to a continuous, wide range of frequencies. Compare sharp ( def. 23 ) .

2.pertaining to or denoting a type of high-speed datatransmission in which the bandwidth
is shared by more than one simultaneous signal.

(REF: www.dictionary.com)

It might help if, at least, the company failed at customer care, but tried to ensure their technical service fits the dictionary meaning of the word. If only in part. 

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