We finally got our phone line yesterday. It turns out, the assholes who laid the pipes, didn't install a phone cable. What superb work. What really grates me is the method of service delivery. Contractors just rock up at your house (sometimes at 8 in the morning on a weekend) with no notice and expect you to be there. They then ask the same questions the previous palooka did, root around a bit, and disappear. You can't find out the progress of the job, because the people at the call centre don't know, and you basically just have to wait for them. We've been in this house 6 months, and we've had 2 full months without a line - compare that to the UK where I had about 6 hours outage in over 5 years. Oh for some decent competition.
In the meantime, we've been up the arch of the new Durban staidum, to the beach pretty much every weekend, and work is stupidly busy. 2010 hasn't had a good start, but it's starting to improve!