Sometimes, I wonder if it's me getting old or large corporations failing to shut up and take my money. Or in this case, somebody else's money.

Although this is my last year "doing the money" for St Columba's, I'm still one of an elite handful of people who "work in IT" and thus do all the geeky stuff. And our new minister moving into the manse should have been a chance to enjoy spending the church's money on a stack of equipment (laptop, mobile phone, etc.) and sorting out an internet connection.

Oh dear, sorting out an internet connection. Here we go again. The default option was Virgin Media: after all, we already have one site with them, so no need for a tedious credit check and a load of faff, just call their sales team (very efficient) and get given a date for a site survey. That gets done, though annoyingly the team they send takes about five minutes to say "we'll need to run a duct, somebody else does that" and buzz off.

They then fail totally to turn up to do the digging, blame it on "our landlords" (a likely story since we own the house outright - though it's possible some tedious neighbour complained to the management company about digging up a shared driveway). They claimed it could be sorted, I decided I wanted it fixed before I turned 40, and moved on.

OK then, let's use the BT phone line already in place. Zen are a supplier I know and trust in situations like this (i.e.: not interested in switching every 18 months to get a good deal, just want good service at a reasonable and stable price). Unfortunately, entering the post code on their site results in a blank grey page. And their social media team seem completely incapable of getting that sorted.

Finally, third time lucky, IDNet got the business, and (aside from some questionable non-default setting choices on their router), seem to have done everything right. I was particularly pleased that their team e-mailed me after I put in an order based on postcode, saying "there's a stopped line in the property - want us to re-start it?" and giving me the number to confirm using 17070. It's been up and running for 24 hours so far, so let's see how it goes...