Those pre-switching blues

Forgive me for feeling more than a little agitated tonight, but as the date of the "big switch" is approaching I thought it was worth a blog post.

Having recently made the decision to "future-proof" my television, phone and broadband service, I'm also well aware that I'm taking a bit of a risk.  If mum was still here she would be fighting this with a vengeance.  She was always of the view that you should have separate services rather than combine all services from one provider.  However I have had problems with my TV recordings over recent months and after years of a good-but-not-great broadband service, I felt that the time was right to move on.

I want to embrace new ways of watching television and recently realised that my broadband was clearly not up to the job, so after 18 years (!) I'm finally parting with my ISP and going with a new provider.  It's a bittersweet parting of the ways as I can honestly say that over that time I've been lucky enough to have a very reliable internet connection, firstly as dial-up and then on to broadband, with only a couple of exceptions. Which isn't bad for 18 years.  But I now need to upgrade.

Long before "on demand" viewing became a thing, I was recording TV shows and watching them at a more suitable time, firstly on video and then on HDD and TV recorder.  Now, I'm impressed by the idea of watching TV on demand in new ways: either via the internet or on catch-up - with a view towards eventually subscribing to Netflix - and I'll get the best out of that with a high-speed broadband connection.  And then of course there is the highlight of every year, Eurovision national finals season, so I'm making sure that my high speed broadband is up to scratch before the 2017 adventure begins.

But my life being what it is, I'm well aware that the course of installation doesn't always run smoothly. In the bigger scheme of things I suppose this is a pretty irrelevant thing to get worried about but I'm naturally feeling very anxious. Being late to the "switching" party, with the same providers for years, I can only hope that in these "always on" days that there are no problems and I'm not left without a service for too long.

I've spend recent weeks getting my backlog of recordings down and realised that I need to get better at not letting recordings mount up.  And for everything else, that will be taken care of by my DVD box set Christmas wish list :)  So much for reducing the backlog!

Anyway I will see you on the other side, hopefully in a few days all being well!