There’s something nice about the early morning in the office. There’s no-one else here, except for one random person and you can constantly annoy them by breaking the silence with irritating keystrokes on your excessively loud keyboard as you type out a blog entry. That, and in an hour and a half, I get a fabulous fry up.

The reason I am here this early is not one of merriment. In fact there are two reasons, both awful. The first is that I have too much work to do. The second is BT.

I’ve just moved house. Again. That’ll be the 3rd time in as many years, not counting the extraordinary amount of time I spent in the US. (Keen observers will say that I wasn’t actually around for the last big move, as I was then living in the aforementioned country. To such people I make silly noises.) As a result, this has become a process that is somewhat familiar and yet never ceases to be annoying. There are a large number of parts of the process which, on their own, are fairly individually annoying and / or painful. Once summed, these combine to produce one of the most awful experiences you can have this side of the Atlantic.

First there is the process of actually finding somewhere. Invariably, I live with other people and so a whole raft of complications is produced when budgets, commuting distances and general priorities attempt to combine into some sort of coherent “this is where we want to live” strategy. Once this place is found, the new process of actually putting in an offer and then sorting through the paperwork is always difficult. It doesn’t help if you have an agent who is mostly incompetent. I won’t name names, but they have a certain reputation and have just gone bust in the US.

Once the property is secured, decisions need to be made about where stuff is going to go. A valiant attempt at measuring all of our stuff, measuring all the rooms, drawing 44.1:1 scale diagrams on pieces of paper and then trying to make them fit was scuppered by an ill-placed (and expensive) trip to Ikea. Cue three weeks of living amongst cardboard boxes full of stuff you’re not quite sure if you need or not.

And then there is BT. I could dwell for hours on BT, but I don’t have that time. I spent about 3 hours on the phone to them yesterday trying to do a simple task. The simple task was this: move my current account from my old address to the line at my new address. Simple? No. The “Home Moving” department promptly decided that my “Home Moving” problem was far to complicated for them and that I needed to be put through to “New Provisions”. Having spent about half an hour on hold just to find this out didn’t make me very happy. I was less happy when I was on hold for an hour before being cut off. I phoned again. Waited another half an hour and got through to exactly the same person in the “Home Moving” department who seemed to recognise me. She proclaimed that “Sunday’s aren’t busy” before putting me reiterating that she couldn’t do her job before putting me through, and therefore on hold, once again. An hour later, my phone battery died.

With renewed vigour and a phone charger, I called again. But I gave up after waiting over half an hour for even the first people to pick up after I realised that I was going crazy very quickly and that others were concerned for my well-being.

I have a plan. My plan is this. It’s 7:43. BT open at 8. Surely no-one else can be as determined as me to move house?