D-Day (or “Has anyone seen my installer?”)

As I sit here writing this on Friday morning, I still can’t quite believe it’s happened. I now have an installed and working ISDN line in my home studio. A small thing, you may think, unless you’ve been reading this blog. I’d love to be able to say that Thursday (installation day) passed without incident, but actually it went something like this…

7am – Raise self from slumber. Shower and dress. I have been promised that my job is first on installer’s list at 8.

8.30 – Call BT in moment of paranoia to check that the job is actually booked and hasn’t been cancelled. Am told it’s booked, but that no one should have said it was first on the list, because they can’t guarantee that. It is suggested that I call back in an hour, when they’ll be happy to call Openreach to check where my installer is.

09.55 – Call again. Nice lady contacts Openreach installer, who was never allocated me as his first job and is somewhere else in London on another. No worries though: he’ll be with me within the next hour-and-a-half, and definitely by 11.30.

12.00 – Installer arrives (only four hours later than promised). Spends a stroky-beard half hour walking around trying to ascertain where the main BT junction box is for our row of houses. Finds said box, repleat with spaghetti wiring arrangement, on back of house. We gain access through neighbour’s garage. I ask if cable can be brought around the outside of the house, rather than through it, as my booth is in the diametrically opposite corner of the premises. This is grudgingly agreed. Fifteen minutes is now spent convincing him that if he drills the hole out through the wall from my booth where I want him to, he’ll come out on the other side of the wall where I say he will. More beard-stroking ensues, but we have a deal. I go back to work while he begins his.

13.30 – I stop work, briefly, and notice there’s no sign of the installer anywhere in the vicinity. Not only that, but his van’s gone too. Has he gone forever? Probably not, as he’s left his toolbox and a reel of Cat 5 cable in the bedroom. Would it have been nice to know he was going? Yes – especially as I’m working downstairs and he’s left all the doors to the road outside hanging open on the latch (this is the middle of London, after all…)

15.00 – There’s a knock at the (now locked) door. He’s back, with a big reel of weatherproof cable (ah, so that’s where he went!) Much hammering as cable is run around the outside of the house.

16.00 – A hole is drilled through the wall with the longest drill bit I have ever seen in my life (about a metre, I’d say) and – to everyone’s surprise, including mine (though of course I don’t say so) – it comes out exactly where I’d said it would.

16.30 – The socket is attached, a green light comes on and – to my utter astonishment – the ISDN card reports that the line is working normally.

Considering I placed my enquiry with BT on 15th October (which they then ignored), then placed my order on 27th October (which then wasn’t placed with the suppliers until I chased it up on 10th November), this has taken 44 days to get installed. That’s a month-and-a-half, for a business service that’s supposed to be supplied in 2-3 weeks.

If this is the kind of service from suppliers, is it any wonder that small businesses so often go to the wall in their first year? Luckily, for me, ISDN is an adjunct to my existing services and a way to grow my business, rather than something I needed to function at all. But I wonder how many jobs I might have lost over the last month that I might have got if it had been in if the timeline had been as promised.

Of course, I’ll never know, and there’s no point in dwelling on the bad experience (though a letter to the CEO’s office is on my to-do list). What remains to do now is to begin the proper marketing of myself to clients – existing and new – as an ISDN voiceover. I’ve bitten the bullet, joined the ranks and the rest is, largely, down to me.

One down, two to go

I am suddenly feeling warm and fuzzy. You know the feeling I mean – it’s the one you get when something that works perfectly for other people but has never worked for you, suddenly starts working and everything falls magically into place.

So it has been for me with AudioTX Communicator. I’ve blogged about it previously, but since it arrived two weeks ago I’ve been unable to get it to work as a VOIP codec. Because I primarily bought it to run as an ISDN codec (the line finally goes in this Thursday, BT willing) I haven’t lost too much sleep over its lack of cooperation on the IP side, but because I feel that VOIP is the way we’ll all go eventually, it was nagging me that, sooner or later, I’d have to get it working properly.

The problem I was having was that, although I could make outward connections to other AudioTX users, I couldn’t accept incoming connections. I knew, on a basic level, that this would be to do with my routers not knowing where to send the incoming data, or blocking it before it got chance to go anywhere at all.

In basic terms, your network presents its shop window to the outside world using your Public IP address (if it presents a shop window at all, that is – ideally you have a firewall that keeps the shutters firmly down most of the time). Your Public IP address is like your telephone number, that anyone in the world can call (if they know it… best to stay ex-directory and just give it to friends for security reasons).

But when you’ve got several machines, printers, hard drives and so on connected to your router, they each need their own Internal IP addresses too – a bit like extensions on a switchboard. The router also needs to know where to direct traffic within your network based on what kind of traffic it is – a bit like a switchboard operator putting you through to sales because you want to make a purchase, rather than the complaints department because it didn’t turn up. All of this is handled by setting up port forwarding and Network Address Translation. The problem was that I didn’t know how to do any of that, till now…

The situation in my home network setup is complicated by the fact that I have two routers: one is an AppleTime Capsule, which includes an Airport Extreme (802.11 n) base station; the other is a Thomson Speedtouch, supplied by my broadband provider. The Speedtouch doesn’t do the superfast wifi thing (it’s 802.11 b/g only), and the Time Capsule doesn’t have a modem in it, so I use the Time Capsule as my wireless router, and the Speedtouch as my connection to the outside world. 

The situation has been further complicated thus far by the fact that the ins and outs of networking have always brought me out in a cold sweat. I’ve always been happy digging around in OS X – and before that in the various flavours of Windows – and my friends often come to me to fix things when they’re broken. I wouldn’t pass anyone’s certification process for tech support, but I’m pretty “computer-savvy”, if I say so myself. But all those boxes, subnet mask settings and the like in networking dialogue boxes have generally made me want to put it all away again and wish I’d never started.

I realised that this wasn’t going to be an option this time around though, so I decided to educate myself. Surprisingly, there was less to it than I’d imagined. It turned out that I’d made a schoolboy error in setting up the way the two routers were connected: whilst I’d disabled wireless on the Speedtouch, I’d not switched the Time Capsule into “Bridge Mode”, so it was doing its own Network Address Translation on top of the NAT already being done by the Speedtouch.

Once I worked this out, it turned out to be easy to set up port forwarding ranges on the Speedtouch so that incoming traffic could get through, and – once I’d established a static Internal IP address for the PC in my booth – to direct that traffic directly to that machine. Hey presto! I now feel slightly less daunted by the networking thing, which will doubtless come in useful in the future.

So, one down, two to go… my ISDN line should be in by lunchtime on Thursday, at which point I can try testing that and make myself available for ISDN sessions (which was always the main thrust anyway). But I also invested in Source Connect, and I’ve yet to get my head around setting up Pro Tools to get that working too. With a bit of luck, by the end of the week I’ll have three ways of providing high quality audio to the outside world in real time. Fingers crossed!

We live in interesting times. Nerdy, but interesting.

Progress is over-rated. BT? Not so much…

I know. It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have spoken so soon (and certainly not in public). The March of Progress has slowed to a slow shuffle, and there’s been a lot of lost time these last two weeks.

Firstly, my shiny new computer – promised to me on the Monday morning as “should be with you by the end of the week”, eventually turned up the following Tuesday, after I cleared two separate days to wait in for it.

Then the monitor I ordered on the Wednesday (and which should also have been with me by the Friday) went astray and got delivered to someone else. How do couriers manage this, exactly? When the replacement finally turned up, it was without either of the promised cables, so could be connected to neither the mains nor the computer. Replacements were acquired to save wasting any more time, a dispute lodged with the eBay seller to recoup the cost, and £24 and a trip to Maplin later, I was in business. Getting Windows XP to play nicely with my Mac and share files properly will probably be the subject of another post, but hey…

Finally, and most upsetting of all, has been my experience with BT over my ISDN line. I placed the order on 27th October, with Ahmed at the BT Local Business office, and was told it would be ten to fifteen working days for installation. Having patiently let the first ten working days pass, I thought it might be wise to give them a call, just to check, you know, how it was progressing… Imagine my delight when I found out that Ahmed was not only on holiday (until 15th December, no less) but that it didn’t look like he’d even placed my order before he skipped out of the building!

His colleague Sylvia, meanwhile, was helpful, and my order was placed by the end of the day. I called the After Sales team to see what would happen next. Maurice was very helpful indeed, made lots of sympathetic cooing noises, and told me my case would be “escalated” to make up for the delay. Someone in “another country” (unspecified, but I don’t think he meant Rupert Everett) would call me back. It wouldn’t be today though, it would be tomorrow morning – within four working hours, no less, but the time difference with the mysterious “other country” meant they’d gone home already.

Tuesday morning passed without a phone call, so in the afternoon I called After Sales again, and was surprised to learn from John that he’d never heard of Maurice, and that – as his was a team of only twelve people - he ought to know. Not only that, but my order was very firmly still awaiting action by the Sales Back Office team. Time for another call to BT Local Business, and a nice chap called Raj.

Raj then tried to call After Sales to find out what was going on. The first time he called he detected a definite air of “can’t be arsed”, beginning almost precisely from the point where he explained he was calling from BT Local Business. So he called again, spoke to someone else, and was assured that my order was, very definitely, “escalated”, and that someone would call me on Wednesday, no question.

It’s Thursday today, and having received no call yesterday I decided to try After Sales one more time – my next line of attack being a letter by Recorded Delivery to the CEO’s office. Alan Moore (I love it when you get someone’s full name) kept me on the phone for a very long time. But that’s fine, because at the end of it, not only had I got a Job Number for the installation, but he also told me that by the end of today I’d have a date for the installation. OK, he’s since called me back and told me that the engineers are dragging their feet, but all the same, it’s the closest thing I’ve got so far to actually getting the bloody thing installed. And my order has now been “escalated” some more, just for good measure. I hope it doesn’t get a nosebleed.

So, as the recession begins to bite, and I ponder how much work I’m losing in terms of clients who don’t want to pay a studio fee on top of my session fee, I’m left with very mixed emotions about the whole thing, which should – in theory – have been so simple. They’re a telephone company, after all. Surely putting in a new line shouldn’t be too far beyond the call of duty?

I note from today’s news that BT has announced the loss of 10,000 jobs. Service like I’ve received makes me inclined to applaud in response, but hopefully they’ll get the rot out and (if there’s any justice), people like Alan won’t be among the ones to go.

Progress!

It’s been quite a week, and much has happened in the world of Mike Cooper, Voiceover Artist. On Monday I finally managed to get someone to place an order with BT for ISDN (three weeks for installation, though) and thus the push to get my studio ready for its arrival began in earnest.

I decided a while back that I would run ISDN via AudioTX (see my previous post), and AudioTX only runs on a PC, so my Mac laptop will be rejoining me as a laptop and will be replaced in the booth by a PC that’s as close to silent as it can be. This should arrive on Monday, fingers crossed, but the specific nature of what I wanted means I’ve somehow managed to end up sourcing all the bits separately – with computer, monitor, mounting arm for monitor, rack-mount keyboard and so on all coming from a variety of suppliers (the ISDN card is even coming from the Netherlands…) To top it all, I spent Thursday afternoon building a nice 6U 19″ rack to put it all in, which now has pride of place in the middle of the bedroom floor until the rest of the kit arrives. I’m praying to the God of Couriers and camping out at home all day Monday in the hopes that most of it turns up then.

And I’m not the only one getting kitted out for the winter: my good friend Trish Bertram (Grand Dame of LWT and ITV promos for most of the last quarter-century) has finally dipped her own toe in the water so that she too can begin to reap the rewards of working from home as a VO. Granted, it’s taken a year or so to coax her to this point – and it’s taken a fair amount of stroking and making of encouraging noises on my part - but I finally spent Friday afternoon connecting her brand new mic up to her shiny new preamp and mixer and playing with a fantastic bit of kit called The Mic Thing, which aims to make any reasonably quiet room into a half-decent recording space. I can report good things so far with regards to its sonic properties.

And Trish? Well, there was a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth, mostly due to some of the stuff on the order form not being the stuff that actually turned up, but now the dust’s settled she seems happy enough. According to the last email I got from her she spent the evening recording duets with Barry Manilow. I think that’s a good thing, but can’t be too sure.