Annoyance

Schools require some form of communication to be able to do there daily work. However when you have a contractor working outside the school gates you can almost set your watch on when things will start to go downhill. In todays case the contractor putting in a new storm-water pipe for a subdivision of a property just up the road was the cause. They had telecom come out and do there survey, well all the purple marks were up and down the street. However, one dig with the bucket revealed the telecom cable 100mm below the footpath, and they managed to give it a bit of tug. First thing to go was the two adsl lines, just as we were trying to get the external mail working in the school after 3 days of not working due to changing ISP from wired country(wireless) to xtra(wired, adsl) and with e-mail backing up and errors being sent back to the senders. Plus the caretaker who doesn’t want to go and get the mail, snail mail that is delivered to a PO Box, that he has the key for down at the post shop, he didn’t believe that he himself hadn’t gotten the mail since last Thursday.
After ringing telecom and getting put through to school/business adsl support and wondering of it was our end or there end, all the other phones systems were working in the school, they did make a mention of noise on the line, however we put that down to we were calling from the server room, they were checking the line and couldn’t detect any faults. When we went outside we could see the problem, and woe and behold, all the rest of the lines in the school are down as well, the cable sitting there cut into two.
Is this the IT technicians job or the IT managers job to ring broadband support and find out what the problem is or report the problem as the case may be? Because we have no IT Mangers at school at the moment, they are away on holiday.
It is now 4:45 and the telecom guys has been working for the past half hour on the job, why might you be wondering how I know this, because I am the only on still at school. I cannot find the property manager and get him to sort it out, instead the contractors saw me and told me that it was my problem. Hmmm. not very nice contractors. But it has allowed me to sit here and blog away while the wind and rain come down very hard outside.
One thing I learnt from this is... make your car visible on the security camera so they know how long you waited, and if your mobile has two bars left on it, charge it up! You never know when it could be needed. Also one of the things I am grateful for is that the students are on holiday and that this has happened in the holidays. We had the phone systems go down last year, same type of situation, 3 days it took them to get it going. We at least had wired country internet services
One of the funniest things is that we are moving away from the wireless internet connections to adsl, really only because of the speed issue. We could have still had email and internet access. Something to thing about?
So the work on the year 13 programming I was going to do today, never happened!

Update to the email problem
It seems with changing to xtra as our broadband provider for out students server, which doubles as the staff email server, that xtra block port 25 xtra.co.nz/port25. This has been our major problems, neither watchdog or our IT support company figured this out. So once port 25 was opened by xtra and we reset our router, email started flooding in.