The above call was Day 7 - i didn’t call again after that. It was futile. You’re not feeling great already dealing with the damage, trudging through the sludge - you don’t need to have your face rubbed in your own powerlessness by Telstra to start each day.

It finally flickered back on in a patchy way on the 11th day. Telstra called to say everything was fine maybe Day 12-13 - the call dropped out literally as the guy was telling me it was fine. He called back but hung up after two rings - i missed it - pressed call back - but it was straight back to the lowest of the low robo-rungs again. Fuck that. That’s the last I’ve heard from Telstra.

In fact, it doesn’t matter whether you get to speak to a person or not - the people (offshore call centre) are, well-trained, at reading off a script - that’s been refined by The Algorithm (see Dan’s novel) from all the calls recorded for training purposes.
They’re bio-bot voices, basically. Telstra could save even more money by ending you at the initial robo-response:

Welcome to Telstra! We’re currently experiencing a high volume of faceless corporate greed, so you could save time by going to fuck yourself now. Thanks for all the money. Good-bye.

The sole purpose of the offshore operator is to serve as an impenetrable buttress between the customer and management. I don’t blame the operator at all - I blame the mega-salaried managers.
Never did get an answer to any of my questions. Still don’t know what the problem was exactly - there was nothing in the media.

I assume: gross incompetence by the experts at a minimum. Infested by Health Safety (new normal) Protocols culture - which amounted to: fuck all

Trouble is: Telstra is one of the biggest sponsors of commercial media out there - so forget about getting any investigative reporting on their colossal failure to deliver in a time of crisis.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Even the publicly-funded ABC won’t cover it coz they’re afraid it may lead to vaccine hesitancy/covid conspiracies (now not being the right time to question the experts etc).

That leaves us with another powerful, faceless, unaccountable corporation (Telstra) - over which we have zero control as a normal person.