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Back in April 2010 I wrote a blog on our trysts with Telstra over the issue of getting a phone connection.
In my many chats with Telstra call centre employees learnt terms like 'greenfield' which doesn't mean a field full of lush green pasture but rather a scraped bare brand new housing development. At the time Telstra was finding it hard to believe that in 2010 there had never ever been a phone connection to number 141 and now we wanted one but we weren't a 'greenfield'.
Fast forward nearly 3 years, we have had a phone all that time, sort of. The connection went down for a week after a cow scratched her back on a phone pole and managed to disconnect the line. Reception is almost impossible when the winds blows above about 25 kph. If it rains more than 60mls at a time the line is likely to go out, and if the wind blows and it rains -- it's called a storm- then we are off the air for a week or so.
Get a mobile, (that's a cell phone to some), you say. Great idea, I reply. I've got a smart phone, it's fantastic, I can check my emails, trawl through facebook, search for anything I want, take photos, play Scrabble with strangers, listen to music.
A joke ( I think): If someone returned to earth from the 1950's, how would you explain the mobile phone?
'I have this small device that I can carry around in my pocket. It can access all the known information in the entire world. '
What do you do with it, they ask.
'I use it to look at cute photos of cats and to send stupid pictures of myself to strangers.'
Back to the story - now we live one and a half hours from the country's largest city and one and a half hours from the nations capital, that's 5 million people not counting the ones who live in between. You would expect communications to criss cross our part of the world like a spiders web, yet we have zero mobile reception.
When you live in the country, ingenuity becomes a vital part of your existence, so we built our own personal 'phone tower'. It adds little to the front garden, but if it's calm and the skies are clear we can sometimes make contact with the outside world
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