Original Decision Maintained

The fault is stuck.

Not the fibre. The fibre is broken, somewhere out past the crossroads where a car took down a pole and a cabinet in July, and everybody agrees about that. What is stuck is the record. And until the record comes unstuck, nobody is allowed to send a man with a meter to the thing that is actually broken.

Raymond has spent fourteen months proving to a telephone company that a small red light on a box in his porch means what it says. He won that argument in June. Now he has a new fault, a new light, six live reference numbers for one piece of glass, and a complaint about the first fault sitting with the Communications Ombudsman.

What follows is a wrong part at an exchange that nobody will admit to fitting, a public holiday in England, a traffic order that may or may not exist, an automatic compensation scheme that pays out when the people who owe the money decide the fault has ended, a request for his own personal data that brings back three pages about a stranger with the same name, and two halves of one company each explaining, courteously and in writing, that the records he needs belong to the other one.

And an independent adjudicator, who is asked to look again.

Original Decision Maintained is the second and concluding book of Try Resetting the Router: a comedy about what happens after the customer wins the argument, and finds out it was never the argument that mattered.

Nobody in it is a villain. Everybody is following a process. There is now also an appeals process.

A work of fiction based on a true story. No event in it should be assumed to be true. The physics, unfortunately, is real.